Reading the festival’s official announcement of Pieter-Jan De Pue’s Mariinka which opened the 23rd edition of Copenhagen’s International Documentary Film Festival, aka CPH:DOX, made the growing issue of AI paradoxically apparent. The film description itself was either created with ChatGPT or so strongly influenced by the chatbot’s characteristic stylistic mannerisms that there was virtually no difference. How the festival that established itself as one of the most important platforms for non-fiction film will discern between real images and fake is not the only problem artistic director Niklas Engstrøm and his team face. Deciding where to draw the line when AI-generated production announcements become the norm and even highly regarded film outlets publish AI-generated reviews becomes an increasingly complex concern.
In the vast program, encompassing more than 200 films with 86 world premieres and six competitions which together included 74 films, this concern seemed still negligible. Not even a handful of films, among them Finding Connection about humans falling in romantic love with AI, Intelligence Rising about a political war game, and The AI Doc - How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which was mostly self-therapy, evolved around AI. More prominent in a present shaped by geopolitical instability and dramatic climate change were the overarching themes of war, social division, and nature’s fragility. From Sundance hailed American Doctor, which follows a collective of three US-American doctors with Jewish, Palestinian, and Zoroastrian backgrounds to their work in Gaza.
Mariinka won the audience award with its harrowing portrayal of Ukrainian lives warped by war. Another Sundance success was Sara Dosa’s mesmerizing Time and Water, wherein Iceland’s dying glaciers become an analogy for fading human memory. The 7-hour-long While the Green Grass Grows intertwined the ephemeral beauty of nature with director Peter Mettler’s personal life. Stylized black-and-white images with symbolical historiographic undertones showed The Great Experiment of the United States’ democracy dangerously close to failure. The Sandbox revealed the fatal repercussions of surveillance and militarization on the most vulnerable groups of migrating people, while Holding Liat accompanied an Israeli family through the titular character’s hostage-holding. Radically opposing viewpoints are part of the program’s vitality while giving a disconcerting outlook on rising reactionism.
As imperialism, right-wing rhetoric, and conspiracy theories become both more aggressive and insidiously manipulative, the question of which works are still part of a versatile debate culture and which are a platform for populism becomes increasingly more pressing. The question of how reality can be authentically represented when images themselves have become battlegrounds of ideology was reflected in the festival’s formal diversity, where essayistic works, hybrid forms, and performative documentaries often took precedence over traditional observational and investigative approaches. This also manifested in the main competition’s DOX:AWARD going to Dongnan Chen’s Whispers in May. With its improvised performances based on the young protagonists’ own backgrounds, the poetic coming-of-age tale threaded a fine line between docudrama and rural fairy tale.
Its dramatic focus on subjective experiences in a moment of profound economic and ecological change highlighted the rise of a hybrid-documentary cinema increasingly invested in the individual impact of political change. The same development emerged in the exploration of the devastating effects of war and its aftermath, spanning from the Middle East to Eastern Europe. Expanding the festival’s cinematic universe was an interactive exhibition under the theme of “Hypervigilance”, assembling artworks and interactive experiences that ironically reinforced the digital surfeit they grappled with. A similar ambivalence demonstrates that the festival’s extensive digital library for online viewing for press and civilian audiences erodes the very essence of a film festival.
Another tendency representative of a broader shift in the international festival sphere, online offers also present a viable excuse for upholding internal hierarchies, accessibility issues, and classist barriers that may prevent already underrepresented groups from attending the actual event, be it as regular audience, press, or industry. Tellingly, the growing focus on a digital festival proves another parallel to Sundance. With its two formative slates for national and international nonfiction forms, Sundance remained once again an essential source of program highlights. Beside the Canadian Hot Docs, it also seems to be the prime competitor to CPH:DOX in the run for the position of the most important international documentary film platform. As an active player in the continuous transformation of the media landscape, CPH:DOX appears more concerned with its own relevance than that of the subjects it presents.
All Award Winners of the 23rd CPH:DOX are listed here.