A magical festival of documentaries at CPH:DOX – enjoy them with a 20 percent Your Danish Life Discount

Now is your chance to flee the cold wind by going to the CINEMA. From 13 to 24 March, at CPH:DOX, one of the world’s biggest documentary film festivals, you can choose from a selection of more than 600 films from around the world.

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By Bente D. Knudsen  Picture: CPH Dox PR,

For its 21st edition, the festival offers an ambitious programme of films, talks, debates, events, parties, audiovisual concerts, art installations and much more.

At the festival centre at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, you will be able to enjoy the unique monochrome interior design of architects Anne Dorthe Vester and Lise Birgens Kristensen in collaboration with designer and artist Birgitte Due Madsen and the three design brands Flos, PLEASE WAIT to be SEATED and &Tradition;ready to be sat in of course

Charlottenborg will also host free VR screenings and interactive installations, as well as an art exhibition and unmissable parties!

All foreign and Danish films will have English subtitles.

OUR BEST TIPS

With such a vast selection of more than 600 films there is certainly something for everyone. Below we have selected a few film tips with an expat audience in mind. All films at the festival are either in English or with English subtitles.

Gaucho Gaucho
In the endless plains and desolate mountains of Argentina live the so-called gauchos. Cowboys and cowgirls dressed in beautiful uniforms and with an almost spiritual connection to their horses and the land they ride on.

They drink mate, race, gallop and lasso as their ancestors have always done. Out of time, but certainly not out of place.

Out here among cacti and dusty cornfields, the gauchos keep the traditions of the past alive. The directing duo behind the hit film ‘The Truffle Hunters’ have an unrivalled eye for the deep relationship between people, animals and the picturesque land they share.

In crystal clear and stunningly beautiful black and white images that capture every grain of desert dust.

‘Gaucho Gaucho’ is not only one of the most beautiful films of the year, but it is also a true Argentine Western with understated humour and a melancholic touch of Old World charm in a time of slow, but certain change.

To see the film’s running times and any associated events, there is a link here:

Blueberry Dreams
Led by the good-hearted father Soso, a family of four starts a blueberry farm to secure their future together. But with a home in northern Georgia, their village is just next to the troubled border with the Russian-backed region of Abkhazia, where new conflicts have been rumbling for 30 years.

Soso is a retired engineer, but together with his wife Nino and their sons Giorgi and Lazare, he throws himself into the ‘Plant the Future’ programme set up by the Georgian authorities to stabilise the area. Nino is haunted by memories of the war and dreams of her children experiencing the world, while Soso wants to maintain their connection to the land.

Giorgi and Lazare long for a different future and dream of visiting Japan. During their daily lives, the family navigates between hardship, joy and contemplation of a different future.

To see the film’s running times and any associated events, there is a link here:

Look Into my Eyes
Whether you’re a believer or not, you will experience the little hairs rise, the tears well up and a smile breakthrough in ‘Look Into My Eyes’.

We meet seven very different people from New York who have one thing in common: they’re psychic. Or at least they believe themselves to be and their clients turn to them to connect with their deceased loved ones.

In simple and focused scenes, Lana Wilson (director of the Taylor Swift film ‘Miss Americana’) confronts us with our possible scepticism, but still leaves the door open to the possibility that there is something to it.

Gradually, we also get to know the seven clairvoyant mediums. It turns out that they are ordinary people with an extraordinary talent who often have a wound or two on their own soul. And perhaps the most important thing is not whether they are right, but how we can reach each other and feel better on both sides of the crystal ball? An intelligent and empathetic tour of that kaleidoscopic universe of our inner life.

To see the film’s running times and any associated events, there is a link here:

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Stray Bodies
One woman travels from Malta to Italy to have an abortion. At the same time, another woman is travelling from Italy to Greece to receive IVF treatment in the hope of becoming pregnant.

Their situations are very different, but they are connected by strict legislation that forces them to seek help outside their home country.

The women are two of the many travellers across Europe’s borders, where religion and politics often have more say over your own body than you do.

The dream destination is not beaches and fancy cafés, but the right to decide for themselves. ‘Stray Bodies’ maps the continent’s many contradictions.

From sperm donation to euthanasia and thoroughly raises the big existential questions about life and death in an unexpectedly fresh and original way, with great cinematic exuberance.

To see the film’s running times and any associated events, there is a link here:

G – 21 scenes from Gottsunda
Gottsunda, Sweden. A suburb of Uppsala and one of Sweden’s most dangerous places. Drugs, crime, gangs, and violence are commonplace.

But Gottsunda is also the childhood home of the film’s director and protagonist, Loran Batti. While he is on his way out and has found a different path, his childhood friends have spiralled further and further into the underworld.

With confidential access to the tough criminal underworld, he takes us behind the media’s portrayal of gang violence in Sweden but not without a certain ambivalence.

A friend turns himself in at the police station, a car is set on fire, drugs are in the glove compartment, elephant hats and weapons are always within reach.

Not everyone can be Zlatan Ibrahimović, so what are the rest to do?

‘G – 21 scenes from Gottsunda’ is an unfiltered look into the ghetto and gang problems of the Swedish suburbs. Told from the inside with familiarity and love for his childhood friends. A brotherhood that runs so deep that the fear of the news that a friend is dead is always just a phone call away.

To see the film’s running times and any associated events, there is a link here:

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Teaches of Peaches
‘Fuck the Pain Away’ was a musical breakthrough in the early 2000s and an inevitable hit in urban nightlife. A song that celebrates female sexual liberation and modern body positivism with a simple electronic beat and irresistible lyrics.

Behind the track was Canadian musician and performance artist Merrill Nisker, better known as Peaches. Since then, pop culture has tried to catch up with the radical body and gender politics she practised, but no one has caught up with Peaches.

With witty and sharp interviews, colourful concert footage and almost prophetic archive material, ‘Teaches of Peaches’ tells the story of the uncompromising singer and artist.

From her punk youth in Berlin to a messy apartment in Canada where her flatmate Feist sings backing vocals on her debut album to preparations for the anniversary tour she has decided to embark on to once again slap the locked structures of society in the face.

To see the film’s running times and any associated events, there is a link here:

Stephen
Stephen Giddings is in his late 20s. He lives in Liverpool, is a recovering drug addict and an actor. He is given an emotionally demanding challenge: to ‘become’ the fictional character of an obsessed gambler in a crime thriller inspired by the 1901 film ‘Arrest of Goudie’, recognized as the first reconstruction of a real-life crime story filmed on the actual locations in the city.

‘Stephen’ is a participatory work created in close collaboration with Stephen and the other participants, both professionals and amateurs. But even though it is a multi-layered hybrid film, something very real is at stake for everyone involved – not least Stephen himself, who grew up in a violent environment of abuse that he is now struggling to escape. Director Melanie Manchot is a visual artist who has previously worked with reconstructions and performance in other media. Her first feature film brings these experiences together in a cohesive, meaningful and thought-provoking form.

To see the film’s running times and any associated events, there is a link here: 

Food Inc. 2
Organic food is taking up more and more space on supermarket shelves and local vegetable markets are popping up in more and more neighbourhoods.

But there are also more and more people on the planet, and 15 years after the Oscar-nominated mega hit ‘Food Inc.’, it turns out that the modern food industry still needs a thorough overhaul.

This is exactly what we get here; you don’t need to have seen the first film to understand just what an incredible impact agriculture and the food industry has not only on what we eat, but on the world around us.

Directing duo Melissa Robledo and Robert Kenner uncover everything from monopolisation, lobbying and the logic of capitalism to what exactly happens in your brain when you eat a McDonald’s burger. But they also look at possible solutions and what the kitchen of the future might look like.

To see the film’s running times and any associated events, there is a link here: 

Black Box Diaries
Shiori Ito is a brave woman with big ambitions. As a journalist, she covers the Washington beat for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers but when her older boss sexually assaults her after a night out, everything changes.

Where many others in the patriarchal Japanese culture would shrug off the assault and turn the trauma inward, she chooses to launch a year-long investigation that ends in a high-profile trial. But opposition from all sides is fierce and it becomes a tough and gruelling battle for Shiori.

Her boss – a close friend of the president – represents an entire system that is hierarchical in a way that is very different from what we know in the West with laws that have not been updated in over a hundred years. But Shiori also gets help from unexpected quarters and in two scenes where good people support her simply because it’s the right thing to do, you can’t help but share her emotions.

The film is Shiori’s diary of an unimaginably hard and lonely struggle to improve women’s rights and bring a conservative culture into the 21st century.

To see the film’s running times and any associated events, there is a link here:

Sting Like a Bee
In the Trigno Valley in central Italy, young people cultivate their own home-styled subculture around the Piaggio Ape three-wheeled moped. Ape means bee in Italian and over the course of a summer the film crew buzzes around the teenagers and starts casting them for a film about their own lives.

Slowly, reality begins to merge with fiction, allowing the Italian youths to dream and become the voices of their own lives, where unity, love, sexuality – and of course, Piaggio Ape – take centre stage.

In beautiful images shot on analogue film, ‘Sting like a Bee’ evolves into a warm, loving and souped-up study of a group of young daydreamers trapped in an Italian nowhere land, who find freedom and a common sanctuary in their passion for the three-wheeled moped. A film that hovers somewhere between ‘Pimp My Ride’ and Pier Paolo Pasolini.