As below, so above at this year’s Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.
I’ll say this much for CPH:DOX: it’s the only festival where I’ve attended a screening inside a disused reservoir. The building that used to house Copenhagen’s drinking water stocks has since become an underground arts venue – the perfect place for an atmospheric staging of Rob Petit’s Underland, adapted from Robert Macfarlane’s best-selling non-fiction book about the strange worlds that team with life beneath our feet. While narrator Sandra Hüller’s dulcet tones echoed around the cavernous, deceptively cold space, the audience huddled under blankets, clutching cups of tea for warmth. It was the sort of immersive experience I always appreciate at a film festival…at least until the screen suddenly malfunctioned five minutes before the end (as is sometimes the pitfall of unconventional screening spaces).
Despite this hiccup, there was a jovial atmosphere in the room, and Petit’s hypnotic film brought distant cave networks and secret dark matter research stations closer than ever, while revealing these same spaces and ideas have fascinated humans for as long as we’ve existed. The underground connects us not only with nature, but while everything that has gone before. While waiting for the bus back into town – contending against the force of a vicious Nordic gale – I pondered the nature of connection within the film festival itself, and how the films that stood out to me the most seemed to echo the theme of revelation in one way or another. With the idea of hidden truths in mind, here are five documentaries that stood out from the pack this year at one of the world’s finest documentary showcases.
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Dark Rooms (Mads Damsbo & Laurits Flensted-Jensen)
Perhaps this is a bit of a cheat, as Dark Rooms is billed as an “Immersive VR Experience” rather than a film, but this 35-minute project showcases the potential of VR for creative storytelling, even if the technology is still a little way off perfection. Through a series of four intimate animated settings, Dark Rooms takes three participants at a time on a journey of sexual exploration, from a secluded forest to a Berlin nightclub and the dreamscape of a dominatrix who goes by the name Lioness. While wearing the VR headset can be disorientating, there was something intimate about attempting to navigate the physical space of the literal dark room, aware two other people were also wandering around. Being able to move about the fictional space while strangers relay their formative erotic experiences directly into your ear through headphones created a sense of intimacy, and although the VR tech is still clearly not at the stage where it can provide totally convincing immersion, Dark Rooms provides food for thought about the ways it might be implemented to bring audiences closer to the stories being told.
Petrolheads (dir. Emil Langballe)
Danish filmmaker Emil Langballe didn’t have to look far to find the subject of his fifth feature documentary; it’s his younger brother Martin (plus Martin’s best friend Caspar). The two car enthusiasts started a blog chronicling their search to find and restore a 1994 Honda Civic, and this provided Emil with a starting point – but as time progressed, the focus of the film became as much as Martin and Caspar themselves as their quest. Both Martin and Caspar are neurodivergent (Martin also has other disabilities) but refuse to let themselves be defined by their diagnosis. In fact, the pair express their frustrations with being pitied or looked down upon, and Petrolheads is refreshing as one of the few films about disability that doesn’t patronise either its subject or its audience. What at first seems to be prime feelgood doc material soon becomes something thornier – a complex and often difficult to watch story about depression, addiction, parental abandonment and exploitation. Langballe’s intimate but non-judgemental framing is only possible through the brother’s deep connection, and this effortlessly charming film is a testament to the necessity of allowing the disabled community the space to speak for themselves in pop culture, particularly when the subject matter is challenging.
Amazomania (dir. Nathan Grossman)
In 1996 a Brazilian civil servant and a Swedish journalist set out to make contact with the remote Korubo tribe in the Amazon – their footage was heralded as a revelation, with Erling Söderström and Diego Lajst hailed as intrepid heroes. Thirty years later Söderström returned – and received a decidedly less enthusiastic reception, with the Korubo people demanding compensation for their exploitation all those years ago. Nathan Grossman picks up the story in the present, using the original footage (some that was never released) to call into question the prevalent white saviour narrative surrounding the indigenous people of the Amazon as well as the ethics of documentary filmmaking.
Something Familiar (dir. Rachel Taparjan)
Documentarian Rachel Taparjan was adopted from a Romanian orphanage as a baby and raised in the UK, thousands of miles from her birth family including her siblings. By the time she was able to look into her origins, her parents had already passed away, but a request to help another young woman who grew up in the same orphanage spurs her to continue looking into her family history, with difficult truths coming to light in the process. Her film shows an immense amount of trust in the audience, remarkably brave in its vulnerability and demonstrating creativity in how Taparjan ultimately decides to reckon with the loss of a mother she was never able to confront.
Mariinka (dir. Pieter-Jan De Pue)
Pieter-Jan De Pue spent ten years filming the young people of Mariinka, Eastern Ukraine for his documentary, only for the city to be decimated following Putin’s invasion of the country in 2022. As of 2023 the city is entirely captured by Russian forces – in the present, the world continues to offer sympathies to Ukraine while nothing truly changes. This stoic but quietly devastating film focuses primarily on four brothers separated by circumstance: one fights for Russia; one for Ukraine; the third is paralysed following a combat injury, and the youngest lives in the United States after being adopted to an American family as a child. Two other subjects fall into the frame: a young boxer turned paramedic struggling to contend with the brutality of war, and a smuggler who capitalises on the disruption to hawk contraband goods. Although there is no shortage of documentaries about Russia and Ukraine (since 2023 three such films have won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film) there’s something truly haunting about Mariinka and the way it captures an entire generation lost to a war playing out before our eyes.
