CPH:DOX, the internationally-renowned nonfiction film festival in Copenhagen, is confronting a dramatically altered geopolitical order, one that th
CPH:DOX, the internationally-renowned nonfiction film festival in Copenhagen, is confronting a dramatically altered geopolitical order, one that threatens the values of freedom of expression upon which the documentary field is founded.
The theme of this year’s festival, decided several months ago, centers on “the state of human rights, civil liberties, and the international rule of law,” festival artistic director Niklas Engstrøm tells Deadline. “We thought it would be very, very timely. I think it became even more timely than we had prepared ourselves for with what is happening right now with the U.S. [Trump] administration de facto trying to change the world order.”
“Talking from a European perspective,” Engstrøm continues, “it’s clear that what the U.S. administration is doing at the moment is really, really impacting Europe in profound ways, and European countries are taking it extremely seriously.”
The festival convened its first ever summit this week, “bringing together politicians, innovators, researchers and documentary professionals to discuss the future of the audiovisual industry.” From the opening moments, summit participants acknowledged the elephant in the room – the tilt towards right-wing nationalism on a global scale.
“With several European countries being only one election away from voting for illiberal and anti-democratic leaders,” CPH:DOX managing director Katrine Kiilgaard said, “there’s more than an urgent need to bring forth the truthful stories and nuanced perspectives that the documentary genre cater to in order to uphold our democracy and shared democratic values in Europe and beyond.”
Apparently alluding to Pres. Trump taking office again, Kiilgaard said, “I think we all got the final wakeup call over the past few months and can now deeply feel that there’s a need like never before to come to together with a collective commitment to this mission.”
Summit attendees heard from Donata Von Perfall, managing director of Documentary Campus which she explained “is an international training organization, fostering emerging talents and creators with tailor-made workshops, symposia like today’s, conferences around the world.” She noted that it also puts on the Silbersalz Festival, an event at the intersection of science, media, technology, and art, which is held in the town of Halle – in a part of Germany that showed robust support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, propelling it recently to unprecedented gains in national elections.
“We work actually in the middle of East Germany where we are surrounded by AfD voters,” she said, “so exactly at the right place to be to make a difference.”
She added, “It’s not only in our DNA, it’s also in our mission to strengthen our community and to contribute to the preservation of our democracies, culture, diversity, and most importantly, peace. The current developments in the world make it more relevant than ever to find together worldwide solutions. And for this I strongly believe we need a strong Europe.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in ‘Facing War‘
CPH:DOX
CPH:DOX programmed several world premiere documentaries that speak urgently to the novel world disorder where the U.S. threatens its allies and abandons leadership of NATO after 80 years. Facing War, which opened the festival last week, focuses on former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who strongly backed Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression. That fit well with President Biden’s worldview, but not Trump’s so it may have been just as well for Stoltenberg that he stepped down last October, shortly before the U.S. presidential election.
“I think we need to be prepared for the probability that the United States may reduce [its] presence in Europe,” Stoltenberg said during a Q&A after the premiere of Facing War. “That was something actually President Trump announced the last time he was president and it’s part of the message on burden sharing — the Americans feel that the Europeans are doing too little and that they’re doing too much in the cost of protecting Europe.”
Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen
Courtesy of Francesco Martello
That was a diplomatic answer perhaps designed to avoid offending Trump. But on Ukraine, Stoltenberg expressed an opinion at pointed odds with the White House. Trump, his secretary of state and his secretary of defense may oppose Ukraine entering NATO, but not Stoltenberg.
“I will say that at some stage we have to do what actually was alluded to in the film — that we need to provide Ukraine with some kind of security, and the ultimate and the strongest security we can provide Ukraine is NATO membership,” he said at the Q&A. “I think that the way actually to end the war in a stable and just way is to actually allow Ukraine into NATO. In the meantime, we need to find something else and that is to arm Ukrainians so they can protect themselves as much as possible.”
L-R U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, President Gerald Ford, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1975 in ‘The Helsinki Effect‘
CPH:DOX
The Helsinki Effect, another CPH:DOX world premiere, hearkens back to a time when the U.S. – imagine that – actually opposed the Kremlin. Arthur Franck’s film examines the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe that drew then-President Ford, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and other world leaders. After long negotiations, the conference granted a Soviet demand to recognize existing borders in Europe, but in exchange required the USSR to commit to easing access to Western media behind the Iron Curtain. The film argues that bargain hastened the end of the Soviet Union.
Flash forward to today and a major news media platform, X/Twitter, has become a megaphone for owner Elon Musk’s support of right-wing movements in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. Pres. Trump has sued multiple American media outlets, including CBS, for news coverage that he sees as unfair to him, and he punished the Associated Press for failing to follow his lead in referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
CPH:DOX Summit panelists L-R moderator Sameer Padania, Christo Grozev, Axel Arnö, Ingrid Libercier, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Matthew Carey
“Many of us [see] with personal consternation what’s happening in the United States,” said Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, at a summit panel titled The State of Information in Europe. “I think we need to remember that so far we’ve seen nothing from the Trump administration that we haven’t seen before inside the European Union, from governments here” – a reference to Hungary and Poland, in all likelihood – “the use of the vast powers of the modern state to punish and reward; the willingness of some select media organizations to be the cheerleaders for those in positions of power; the acquisition and control of media organizations with oligarchs who sometimes attack politicians, sometimes sidle up to them for ideological reasons or to protect their business interests.”
Investigative journalist Christo Grozev in silhouette in ‘Antidote’
CPH:DOX
Investigative journalist Christo Grozev also appeared on that panel. His story of being put on a Kremlin kill list after exposing the Kremlin plot to poison Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is told in Antidote, a documentary directed by James Jones that also premiered at CPH:DOX. He offered a reality check to anyone who might hope that independent news outlets could make a significant impact in authoritarian states.
“This was the trick that Putin had discovered and used it for many, many years and decades successfully to maintain his power,” Grozev noted, “which was that it doesn’t matter if there’s [nominal] freedom of speech as long as you control the majority of the funnel of the information. It doesn’t matter if a bubble of 20 percent of the population is allowed to consume their own little media — Echo of Moscow [radio] in Russia, Novaya Gazeta [newspaper]– they’re not going to outreach the bubble and they’re not going to in any way contaminate the narrative that is being fed [by the Kremlin].”
He did offer a more sanguine perspective on what nonfiction cinema can do in such tightly controlled media environments.
“I’m trying to contaminate the audience of the majority narrative. And I found that that works better with film and documentary than with old media, with traditional media, because the traditional media is where people are bubble-ized; they stay within their traditional channels of information,” he said. “And with film and documentaries you can cross that boundary. And with the film Navalny three years ago, I think that taught me that lesson because I saw that that film was seen by so many Russians who otherwise would not have believed any of the investigations that they would read occasionally in the newspapers that we had done. But they saw it, they saw the emotion, they saw visually how this happened, and they were convinced, but they also found it easier to watch because it was a film, and it was a thriller film.”
So there you have it, documentary community – a way forward in the novel world order where autocracy is on the rise and freedom of expression is on the run.
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