“We don’t want to be boring” say CPH:DOX heads as festival celebrates its 20th anniversary

A 12-day celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX) starts today (March 15) with the promise of a party every day. 

“Even though the world is at a dark place, we still think that it’s time for celebrations in our sphere,” says artistic director Niklas Engstrom.

An anniversary is also a chance to reflect. “We took this 20^th anniversary event to consider ‘what do you do when you celebrate an anniversary?’” says Engstrom. “We can talk about the significance of the festival; but we [also] want to take this anniversary as a starting point for a broader conversation on the significance of the past, and the significance of the future in the contemporary that we live in.” 

The festival’s theme for 2023 is ‘Predicting the past, rewriting the future’, with complementary dual strands just for this year’s event. One will focus on how history is returning – “You see it with Putin’s invasion in Russia and how his arguments are of a historical nature”, says Engstrom – with a separate ‘mirror’ programme on the significance and our imaginations of the future – “that actually changes there here and now as well.”

World premieres 

For the first time, all the titles in the festival’s main Dox:Award competition are world premieres – up from only half of them last year. It wasn’t a conscious choice, Engstrom says, but is a timely indicator of the change in the status of the event, which didn’t even have a significant premiere policy until eight years ago (it now requires at least a European premiere in the Dox:Award section).

The 13 films selected this year include Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s A Storm Foretold, documenting the Trump-inspired build-up to the attack on the US Capitol building through the figure of his advisor Roger Stone; and Jialing Zhang’s Total Trust, which the festival describes as “the first major film about the Chinese surveillance state.” While not an official policy going forwards, the world premieres are “a very natural development where we’ve just kept our priorities first and foremost, and then the time seemed ripe this year,” says Engstrom.

A selection of high-profile guests hailing from the worlds of film, art, music and literature are expected in town. Joan Baez, the iconic 60s folk singer, will present US documentary Joan Baez, I Am A Noise, in the Sound & Vision strand on March 22 with a live talk, while Swedish musician Jose Gonzalez will give a curated talk and live performance alongside the world premiere of A Tiger In Paradise. It is a documentary about his career directed by Mikel Cee Karlsson and produced by Plattform Produktion’s Erik Hemmendorff.

Social issues will be prominent on screen and in the festival’s highly-respected talks strand. With Iran in the international spotlight over the past year, Wim Wenders is presenting A Sense Of Place, six Iranian shorts created by producer Afsun Moshiry and developed through The Wim Wenders Foundation. Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian and author of popular non-fiction books Utopia For Realists and Humankind: A Hopeful History, will give a talk about tax havens, cohesion and the social contract. 

Outsider focus

Engstrom has been with the festival since its inception in 2003. “I didn’t get a salary for the first five years!” he recalls. “We just did it for the fun of it. It was a young spirit that went through the festival organisers and the audiences; we’ve tried to hold on to this, also through getting younger people inside the organisation.”

The festival’s programme department even includes a so-called youth editorial committee, “so that the festival doesn’t get as boring as we do,” he jokes.

Katrine Kiilgaard joined CPH:DOX in 2015 to lead the industry platform. She saw CPH:DOX as “the naughty kid on the block who challenged the industry and the genre.” Kiilgaard was asked to take on the role of managing director for Copenhagen Film Festivals by the board in February last year and has looked to maintain that outsider stance where possible. “It’s a game of keeping a balance between the very experimental and more marketable films,” says Kiilgaard. “We set a goal every year to find projects that are not mainstream.”

“We look for artistic quality, originality, diversity in terms of perspective,” says Engstrom, but a key word above all is “relevance. A film can be super experimental, or it can really challenge the genre. But if it actually wants to tell us about what’s going on in the world somehow, then it can be really relevant.”

For this year Engstrom and Kiilgaard  have worked to bring the festival’s infrastructure up to date. The ticketing system  is now in-house and using Eventive, the system utlised by festivals including Sundance. This allows it to manage its own bookings and collect its own data. It previously relied on individual cinemas.

CPH: DOX was the first festitval to move online in the pandemic in 2020 and three years later the focus is very much on the physical. “We have moved to a long digital tail,” says Kiilgaard. Talks will be available online after the event, as will those from the CPH:Forum industry strand, which is expecting close to 2,000 in-person attendees at a similar level to last year.

As a means of reducing its carbon footprint, CPH:DOX has implemented a policy of one air travel round trip per employee per year, with employees able to pass their trip on if they are not using it in a particular year.  Kiilgaard and Engstrom took a 30-hour train ride rom Copenhagen to Venice for the Italian festival in 2022. “It’s the longest and most efficient management meeting we’ve ever had,” laughs Kiilgaard. “We took so many decisions, took notes – all kinds of things that we don’t do in our everyday lives.”

Further eco-conscious initiatives include providing industry guests with tickets for the Copenhagen metro, instead of using the festival cars that remain popular with many major events.

CPH:DOX is funded by what Kiilgaard calls “the three steady pillars” – the city of Copenhagen, the government-backed Danish Film Institute, and Creative Europe. It is run for “very little money” compared to other major documentary events including International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, says Kiilgaard. 

That will not stop the 20-year celebration staying true to the CPH:DOX ethos, though. “We are still trying to provoke, we’re still trying to set the agenda,” says Engstrom. “We are very much in a celebratory mood.”

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