Past, Present and Future Collide at CPH:DOX 2023

Nordic nature docs unite

On CPH:DOX’s 20th anniversary, the Copenhagen-based documentary festival looks to the future. 

With the most immediate, threatening effects of the global pandemic behind us, the industry — represented at the festival by both established and emerging documentary and experimental filmmakers — has its eyes on what comes next. 

CPH:DOX approached the broad questions of the future in a  symposium entitled Future at our Fingertips, aiming to counter the uncertainties of the future with a belief that the documentary community, and the documentary form itself, can create its own.

While the symposium was chiefly concerned with questions of openness and democracy in film production and distribution, it nevertheless provoked my own curiosity about how the festival’s overall programming looked forward. Hoping to capture an element of this progressive energy — and given I was in Copenhagen — I took it upon myself to also focus on a small selection of Nordic documentaries, among dozens included across the festival’s competitive and thematic programmes. 

The films that met me along the way each possessed their own inspiring, challenging, and radical visions of the future, refracted through the dual lenses of history and the present.

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.