Soaring new heights

Reflections on Films at CPH:DOX 2025

Apr 08, 2025

Scouring new heights

From dodging ticket inspectors to dodging documentary propaganda, this year, CPH:DOX presented a programme packed with a perfectly wrapped retort for the neoliberal freedom fighter. Being my introduction to the European film community and Copenhagen, I learned first of Denmark’s deep colonial history, which seasoned my palette when continuing to see the banal European exchange between the third world in the name of cinema. Even more thrilling was the lack of global majority filmmakers throughout; a lack, in part, accommodated by my dare to live Danish party where dreams do in fact come true. Meeting Julianknxx was the highlight of the trip.

The theme this year – Right Here, Right Now touted that All humans are born free and equal, but I say: not in Copenhagen; not at CPH:DOX. This festival is extensively white, offering specialist programmes to attendees. My recent appreciation for Jean Painleve found some common ground. Indeed, his ability to weave jazz alongside the wonders of science inspires me. There is a sense of childlike wonder in his constructed cinematic image. Zizek calls this scientific perversion the structure of the screen-spectator relationship, where we, the viewer, are removed from our object of desire, the image, which is separated by the screen. Through this separation, Painlevé gives us phantasmagorical science. A sensibility that was also reflected in Eleanor Mortimer’s debut documentary, How Deep is your Love (2025). For this film, she boarded a research vessel in the deep Pacific to encounter a taxonomy of 1.75 million ocean species. Barbie Pig, Psychedelic Elvis Worm draw the viewer in, where we soon engage with the aftermath of the 2023 International Seabed Conference. I like underwater creatures, this film gave the viewer access. It was not a groundbreaking film and did not package itself as such. Sound design and form remained consistent throughout, with a play on the galaxy as an ocean, and a to and fro between diegetic and non-diegetic sound.

The road to recovery is slow. Post apartheid South Africa left microcosms of distinct geographical characteristics in its ruins. Milisuthando (2023) brought my attention to the Transkei along the Indian coast; her self-titled film did not feature in CPH:DOX. Instead, it co-exists alongside Fear Fokol (2025), which was programmed and highlighted the characteristics of Johannesburg in the Gauteng Province. Tuva Björk follows the work of private security guards to reveal neighbouring wealth segregation built into the local architecture. You find examples like this throughout history. Famously, Robert Moses, with his low Southern State Parkway bridge, too low for buses filled with majority blacks and Puerto Ricans. Through this film, Tuva highlights a continued divide built into the landscape, predicated by race and wealth. We see more of this in The Rule of Stone (2024), where Danae Elon, daughter of Israeli journalist Amos Elon, paints a vivid landscape of Arab censorship in Jerusalem, rooted in the British Empire. Where Tuva tours South Africa, Danae reflects on home. These two exist on opposite sides of the spectrum.

Stones give us a way to tap into history. Crossing life and death, holding fossils; shifting between elements, absorbing moisture from the air, and passing it down to the soil. This material was a strong sub-genre throughout the festival. In Maeve Brennan’s Siticulosa (2025), we are taken to southeastern Italy in search of cave plunderers. A parallel to Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023). This documentary style dominated the story, and one left the screening feeling an unequal favour towards the topic, unlike the filmmaker. Even I think this critique somewhat harsh, and find the filmmaking journey to reward a certain knowing when to let a topic speak for itself.

For some people today, work has become home. In this view, the psychological space that home traditionally occupies is taken up by an accelerated focus on work. The director of Scrap (2025), Noémie Lobry, trained as a mechanical engineer. This sets the tone for her film, which explores a kind of ruin. A poetic retort to the history of mechanical wastelands weathered and bleeding in our ocean. She evoked techniques that jar and wake the viewer, finding esoteric connections conducted like an orchestra live on stage. This work felt deeply personal. Noémie maintained a personal aura on stage, breezing through the Q&A. Filmmakers like her allowed this festival to maintain a semblance of inspirational captivity. As a student in this European ocean, I left the city feeling rejuvenated and made almost whole.

Morgan Quantance’s Available Lights (2025) continued along this theme of the personal. It recontextualised identity across space, ruminating on home, belonging, and cultural touchpoints accessible through our roots. Why does he make films about Japan as a Black man from London? How can this tie into his experience of the urban environment? Morgan is a multifaceted artist working across music, literature, and cinema. His films are therefore multimodal, leaving an imprint on the nature of the medium. In this way, his work is truly contemporary, contrasting with Ramallah, Palestine (2018). Juliette Le Monnyer chose a reductionist approach to depict a strip in occupied West Bank. Having her origins in Belgium, she too found herself engaging with the cultural touchpoints accessible through her roots. In this vein, she offered a film that did not attempt to alter. The western gaze is brought in as is, playing on the notions of slow cinema. I think this film failed in that the gaze always and forever remained at the whim of Juliette Le Monnyer. Her nonsensical fixation on moving wheels and piles of rubbish. This film was shot in 2018, and counters the theme of the festival. It failed to account for any changes to the landscape since initial production. Stifling current information decelerates the solution, no attempt was made to have any conversation; therefore, this only worked to blur the message. It sufficed to fashion binoculars to peek at war-ridden debris from the comforts of a hotel room balcony. This film won an award.

International Satan’s Days (2025) by Raed Yassin conjured thoughts on Jean Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos. By creating an eerie atmosphere where our attention is drawn to the incessant bubble from the landscape and the misty clouds of smoke in which appear satanic symbols at sporadic intervals, Raed stimulates the conscious viewer to dwell on the dying planet. Similarly, Sartre’s play reconsiders the role of humanity as we all participate in the community-building activity, whether we like it or not. It was the only silent movie I experienced at the festival. Ironic given the director's status granted by his need to perform his music tour in some part of the world, not in Copenhagen. Today, there is a major fear of AI. My stance is to get on up and learn a thing or two that will supercharge your creativity. Piotr Winiewicz’s view could be represented by his latest film About a Hero (2024). A horror that breathes life into a generative AI-based film script, written in the style of Werner Herzog. It truly was the most entertaining film screened for its attempt at, though chaotically, engaging the questions of life. Creating dilemmas in existence, like the limits in language or the enlightenment through advanced science. The importance of love? By playing on these deeply humanly flawed concepts, the film was able to grip its viewers into believing that the film would progress to a satisfactory ending.

The inner-city municipal managerial impact of an apartment complex in São Paulo is the foundation for Copan (2025) by Carine Wallauer. Dealing with a real and political issue in Brazil, where hyperpolitiic where the “illusion of choice between contenders hid[es] the rigidity of the consensus underlying the contest”. An audibly bassy garden of geometry in architecture is woven into flattening conversations with bureaucracy. Whilst Gaspard Hirschi’s I am Night at Noonday (2025) paints a different picture of the streets in Marseille. We are taken through a magically entertaining, albeit essentialist and trope-led, route of a Don Quixote doppelganger’s investigation of the southern French city. Though fantastical, the image we see of the city fails to paint a diverse one, instead showing a white romantic gaze into the lives of people that experience real impact. There are also multiple junctures of questionable ethical filmmaking, which cast an unfortunate shadow over the works, tampering it’s visual stimulating powers.

My time at CPH:DOX was short-lived. I made friends and drank wine. Some films more memorable than others. You can catch these films for an even shorter time on PARA:DOX.