When does childhood end? This slippery question becomes the crux of Chinese filmmaker Deming Chen’s second feature documentary, Always. The film, which won the top prizes at CPH:DOX and Jeonju over the past two months, centers on an 8-year-old boy, Gong Youbin, and his family in a small village in southern China’s Hunan province. Before the film’s North American premiere at Hot Docs, Chen and Producer Hansen Lin shared with Documentary the feedback they received at different labs and forums, the selection of poems for their film, and the approach of prioritizing emotions, rather than logic, in crafting the story.
CPH:DOX
The 23rd edition of CPH:DOX wrapped last month, with record-breaking attendance and satisfied delegates at the festival’s market, but individual events at the industry conference revealed ruptures in the front of documentary unity against political threats. Filmmaker Omar Shargawi issued one of the most visible criticisms, reading a statement contrasting the festival’s support of Ukrainian filmmakers to a lack of “solidarity with the Palestinians” at an industry talk. At the closing ceremony, Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm and Executive Director Katrine Kilgaard said their aim was “pluralism” and “to make room for a multitude of opinions and ideas, including those that challenge our own perspective as a festival.” Documentary reached out to Engstrøm for further comment via email after the festival ended.
Despite the fact that CPH:DOX has emerged as a highly successful and thriving destination for the documentary industry every spring, this year’s event was shrouded by global economic and political turmoil. If previous year’s editions rehashed familiar complaints about financing and distribution woes, this year’s threats were both more urgently physical and existential. American documentary filmmakers looking for life preservers in Europe in the face of the “MAGA-ification of U.S. gatekeepers”—as Variety called it in a festival report—found the consensus in Copenhagen was that it wasn’t going to be easy.
Phantoms of the Sierra Madre Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes made his name with confrontational documentaries in which he explores the motivations
Filmed in Mongolia for over seven years, Daughter of Genghis follows Gerel, a 33-year-old loving single mother by day and a balaclava-wearing leader
“In a time when public interest media is in jeopardy—from market forces, from big tech, from political pressures—we need to organize,” declares DISCO
Twenty years after its founding, Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX has grown into one of the world’s most significant documentary film festivals, thanks to both
Responding to the “permacrisis”—a 2022 “word of the year” meaning “an extended period of instability and insecurity” and the title for one of the talks at this year’s CPH:DOX film festival and conference in Copenhagen—was a prevailing theme at this season’s March event.
Unfolding over three informative afternoons at the 2022 hybrid CPH:DOX (March 23-April 3), CPH:CONFERENCE’s “Business as Unusual” was the catchily
An unapologetically progressive fest since its 2003 inception, CPH:DOX has never been content to merely showcase films. From the start, it set out to