“The Cord” by Nolwen Elvé won a special award in the main competition category at Copenhagen International Airport. The Documentary Film Festival, also known as CPH:DOX, was one of six European films to participate in Europe. An online showcase of documents at the festival. Variety spoke to the film’s directors.
Europe! Docs, a collaboration between European Film Promotion and CPH:DOX, will offer U.S. buyers six European documentaries from this year’s CPH:DOX lineup. All films were screened as world premieres at DOX:AWARD, the festival’s flagship competition section.
Nolwen Hervé “The Cord” (France)
“The Code” centers on community health workers in Carolina, Venezuela, who strive to protect the health of pregnant women and ensure safe childbirth in a country where the medical system has collapsed.
Although Hervé is an experienced journalist, he did not want to approach the film in that capacity. She instead preferred a personal approach, telling Variety that she was “going through a period in my personal life where I had a lot of questions about myself about motherhood.”
She worked undercover in Venezuela, using local fixers to make many arrangements due to the repressive nature of the regime. “It was too dangerous to say, ‘Okay, I’m a journalist.’ I wouldn’t be able to do my job as well because they’d always be chasing me.” Karolina had deep ties to the community and acted as a kind of “protector” for Hervé.
Much of the film was shot in Carolina’s patrol car, giving it a degree of intimacy, privacy and safety, Hervé said.
Hervé has been in constant contact with Carolina since May, when she last visited Venezuela. Hervé says there has been little improvement in the lives of Carolina and her team since the abduction of Nicolas Maduro and the subsequent thaw in relations with the United States. “Most of them are very cautious. They don’t know what will happen because there has been a lot of repression and nothing has changed in their daily lives,” Hervé said.
Rachel Tapaljian, director and protagonist of Something Familiar
Provided by Manifest Film
Rachel Tapaljian “Something Familiar” (Romania, UK)
In Something Familiar, Mihaela and Rachel Tapaljian, a British-Romanian filmmaker and academic who were adopted from the same Romanian orphanage, set out to find their lost biological family.
“This film is about hope and overcoming adversity and trauma,” says Tapaljian, adding that it focuses on universal themes of identity and belonging.
“Mihaela and I started this journey not knowing what we would find, but we were motivated to find out who we were, where we came from, and some of the reasons why we ended up in an orphanage in Romania.”
To understand why a biological mother placed her daughter in an orphanage, Tapardian “lifts the lid on[communist Romania’s]birtherist policies and reveals how they really affected women,” she says. Tapaljian wanted to show that their biological mothers “weren’t the cold, emotionless people you tend to see in Eastern Europe. That’s not the case. They were subjugated, which meant that their bodily autonomy was so limited. I never understood the extent of that.”
“Christiania”
Provided by Tambo Film
“Christiania” directed by Karl Friis Forchhammer (Denmark)
In “Christian” Karl Friis Forchhammer looks back on more than 50 years of Copenhagen’s nominally autonomous commune. Although the director was born there, his parents moved there on the same day, so the film is an homage to an area the director never lived in until recently, when local residents offered him an apartment. “I’ve been fooled my whole childhood here, and they told me stories about this crazy place,” he told Variety.
The film explores what the director calls a “social experiment” and asks the question, “What are the limits of tolerance?” For Christiania, this was not just a theoretical practice, but one with profound consequences. The tolerance for drug use has led to dealers using Christiania as a hub for selling drugs, leading to violent fights between biker gangs for control of the business.
The film also focuses on how residents use community meetings to decide local issues, where consensus has to be reached rather than majority vote. “Having to make decisions with people you disagree with or don’t share your core values isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” he says.
“Marinka”
Provided by Savage Film
“Marinka” by Pieter-Jean de Pew (Belgium)
At the center of Peter-Jean de Pew’s Mariinka are four orphaned brothers, two of whom are fighting on opposite sides of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. However, the film is not about the war itself; De Pew says, “It’s a story about young people trying to survive in a war, but it goes deeper and focuses on the divisions within families that predate the full-scale invasion in 2022.”
When De Pue began filming the film in 2017, the focus was on the four brothers, but over time it expanded to include two young women, Natasha, an EMT and aspiring boxing champion who “wanted to escape the daily hardships” and Angela, who was “stowaway to make money and save her head.”
“This kind of struggle shaped their character in that they had to be very flexible and inventive and adapt to war situations,” de Pue said. And this forces them to live in a dilapidated city. “Everyone had to deal with their own traumas and personal issues, and at the same time they had to survive,” he says.
“Amazonia”
Provided by Barbara Alisi
Nathan Grossman “Amazomania” (Sweden, France, Denmark)
Amazonia reimagines footage from Swedish journalist Erling Söderström’s 1996 expedition to document the lives of the isolated Kolbo people. “This is probably the most extensive archive in existence of an Amazon expedition to contact groups in self-isolation,” director Nathan Grossman says of the archival material.
Upon reviewing 65 to 70 hours of footage, Grossman said, “I was struck by how many situations there were that made me feel uncomfortable as a filmmaker and as a journalist.”
“This film is very important in some ways to how documentaries have been made, and I think we did our best to make it the right way,” Grossman says.
“He could have made a movie with more questions about violence, weapons, guns, death. There’s a lot more in the footage, because that’s a lot of what he spent those expensive tapes playing,” Grossman says. “The film looks at the story of this adventure, incorporates it into an act, and reconsiders what it means.”
“Arctic Link”
Provided by Ensemble Film
Ian Parnell “Arctic Link” (Switzerland)
Ian Parnell’s Arctic Link started with a map showing all the internet cables connecting the world. The director says he already had “a realization that the Internet shaped the way I grew up” and wanted to explore how communities not yet connected to the World Wide Web would view the prospects of the Internet’s arrival.
The film travels between a fiber-optic cable-laying ship and a remote community in Alaska. There are hopes for the benefits promised by the advent of Internet connectivity and fears about the negative effects of the online world.
Purnell said one of his motivations for filming on a cable-laying ship was to make an “inanimate object” – the Internet – “feel a little more alive.” Cable footage also suggests the anxiety local communities may be feeling. “Internet cables that run under the ocean have become a living thing, so much so that we often refer to them as territorial snakes,” Parnell says.
In the Alaska Native communities he photographed, he says, there was a “recognition that the manipulative influence of the internet could lead to new forms of addiction.”
However, this concern is balanced by the recognition that the Internet can have practical benefits, including in the commercial, medical, and educational sectors.
Attitudes in indigenous communities range from women who have moved to cities and returned to their home communities, who value the natural world and are concerned about how the Internet will destroy their traditional way of life, to older men who do not need or have no interest in the Internet.
The subtext of this development is that climate change will cause Arctic ice to retreat and open new trade routes through the Bering Strait. This makes the region more strategically important.
