The 2025 edition of CPH:DOX, Copenhagen’s premier international documentary film festival, opened with Facing War, a poignant documentary offering a rare glimpse into the final year of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s tenure amidst the escalating Russo-Ukrainian conflict. While some critics observed a degree of political circumspection in its portrayal of diplomatic machinations, the film’s premiere proved remarkably prescient, coinciding with former President Trump’s re-entry into the political arena and heightened anxieties regarding the stability of European alliances. This selection underscored CPH:DOX’s enduring commitment, as one of the world’s leading documentary festivals, to fusing aesthetic ambition with incisive political commentary, a mission that feels increasingly vital in an era marked by proliferating global conflicts and complex geopolitical shifts.
The Art of War: Documenting Conflict with Poetic Urgency
Continuing the festival’s recent tradition of foregrounding narratives from Ukraine, Pieter-Jan De Pue’s Mariinka emerged as a standout, striking a delicate and powerful balance between artistic vision and immediate urgency. De Pue, renowned for his immersive approach and distinct visual style, previously garnered critical acclaim for his 2016 film, The Land of the Enlightened. In that seminal work, which premiered at Sundance, De Pue spent years living alongside orphaned child soldiers in Afghanistan, crafting a celluloid dreamlike fable that deliberately challenged the prevailing visual reduction of the country to scenes of devastation and conflict.
In Mariinka, De Pue turns his lens to the Donbas region, a territory along the Russia-Ukraine border whose imagery has similarly been burdened by narratives of conflict and destruction. Filming for over a decade in and around the titular small city, situated on the frontline prior to Russia’s full-scale occupation in 2024, De Pue again immerses himself in the lives of children whose innocence has been irrevocably shaped by war. Among his subjects are brothers tragically pitted against each other on opposing sides of the battlefield, and Natascha, a young paramedic whose lyrical narration lends the film its haunting voice. Composed from footage meticulously gathered in trenches, along international borders, and during reflective interludes, Mariinka offers a profoundly poetic and deeply personal portrait of a profoundly wounded Donbas.
In an era where contemporary war documentaries are often characterized by the raw, rough-hewn digital imagery favored for its austere immediacy, De Pue’s artistic choice stands in stark contrast. Armed with a 16mm camera, he consciously sacrifices some mobility in favor of a more exalted and timeless visual register. The inherent warmth and grain of celluloid lend an extraordinary dignity to the protagonists’ close-ups and the vast, star-filled skies that punctuate the narrative. This tactile texture also imparts a visceral force to otherwise harrowing scenes, such as the pulsating of an artery after a near-fatal shot or the panoramic view from atop a tank in active combat. Mariinka masterfully exposes the bipolar yet profoundly powerful nature of war "cinema"—its ability to be at once visually immaculate and emotionally tender, while unflinchingly graphic, creating an artful expression of the surreal reality of conflict. This approach positions Mariinka not just as a document of war, but as a meditation on human resilience and the enduring power of cinematic artistry in the face of unimaginable adversity. The choice of 16mm also serves as a subtle commentary, echoing the historical lineage of war reportage while simultaneously elevating the material beyond mere journalism, into the realm of timeless art.
Navigating Identity and Surveillance: Stories of Young Women and Global Borders
Beyond the frontlines of overt conflict, CPH:DOX 2025 showcased a strong emphasis on character-driven, sensitive documentaries, with a notable focus on young women navigating complex political pressures and social crises. Among these, Dongnan Chen’s Whispers in May, from China, captivated audiences and critics alike, ultimately earning the competition’s top award, the prestigious DOX:AWARD. Chen’s film unfurls as a captivating coming-of-age road-trip fable, meticulously anchored in observational documentary.
The film’s heroine, fourteen-year-old Qihuo, embodies the struggles of a "left-behind child" – a common social phenomenon in rural China where parents migrate to urban centers for work, leaving their children in the care of relatives or sometimes, as in Qihuo’s case, largely self-sufficient. Qihuo is a lonely, often truant child, loosely parented over the phone by her mother, a migrant laborer whose distant influence alternates between pressuring Qihuo towards factory work and calculating the transactional benefits of marriage. This stark portrayal offers a window into the economic realities and societal expectations placed upon young women in certain regions of China. The narrative gains momentum when Qihuo confides in two friends about her first menstruation, a pivotal moment that ignites their collective journey. The trio embarks on an odyssey through the breathtaking, yet often challenging, Liangshan Mountains, a region known for its unique cultural heritage and indigenous communities, in search of the traditional skirt that signifies this profound rite of passage.
Chen describes her filmmaking method as "improvised fiction," a supple approach that skillfully honors both the girls’ fearless spontaneity and the indelible folk imprint of the picturesque landscape. Throughout their journey, the film masterfully intercuts still illustrations accompanied by a voiceover narrating the oral myth of Coqotamat. This ancient tale, at turns comic and threatening, resonates deeply with the girls’ own prolonged voyage, weaving a rich tapestry of cultural lore into their modern-day quest. The camerawork is remarkably persistent, following the heroines into suspicious houses at night or through torrential rain in their search for shelter, yet it also knows precisely when to grant them distance as they speak quietly and intimately about their futures. Through such moments of profound attentiveness, Whispers in May blossoms into a lyrical celebration of innocence and female solidarity, set against the backdrop of breathtaking mountains that seem ready to both embrace and swallow them whole. The film’s win at CPH:DOX highlights its universal appeal in exploring themes of adolescence, tradition, and the search for identity amidst socio-economic pressures.
By stark contrast, Kenya-Jade Pinto’s debut feature, The Sandbox, turns its gaze to those deliberately denied visibility and the recognition of their lives as valuable. This sweeping exposé dissects the global surveillance machine, under which migrants of every kind are disproportionately the first to fall. The film meticulously details how drones, robots, CCTV, and advanced AI technologies are now deployed on an unprecedented scale to control migration at the borders of privileged states, effectively transforming these zones of patrol into profitable trial grounds for nascent technologies. Pinto adopts an almost ruthlessly global perspective, with the film traversing continents—from North America to Europe and Africa—to trace both the engineers and policymakers who fine-tune these increasingly invasive technologies, and the migrants whose lives are tragically reduced to mere test cases.
Formally, The Sandbox mirrors the bleak divide it diagnoses, oscillating between the inhuman gaze of thermal imaging and drone footage, and the ground-level intimacy of survivor testimonies and volunteers diligently searching for human remains. While the film’s vast scope, crossing numerous geographies and migratory flashpoints, occasionally risks skimming over deeper contextual nuances, it recovers significantly in its sheer breadth. This expansive observation renders a harrowing unease about a world where, as governments perfect their borders, humanity appears to forfeit its own. The Sandbox serves as a crucial, timely warning about the ethical ramifications of unchecked technological advancement in border control and its dehumanizing impact on vulnerable populations, inviting viewers to critically examine the future of global mobility and human rights.
Excavating Truths: Memory, Technology, and Utopian Visions
Multimedia artist and researcher Manuel Correa, a distinguished member of the acclaimed research agency Forensic Architecture, manages to foreground the humane within the inhumane in his powerful film, Atlas of Disappearance. Correa confronts the lingering traces of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain by excavating its buried truths through cutting-edge technology. Eight years in the making, the film centers on three relatives of citizens who disappeared during the Francoist regime, as they navigate an exhausting and often intentionally obstructive bureaucratic maze in their quest for answers.
Correa masterfully counters this governmental obstruction with innovative digital maps of sealed mausoleums and sophisticated 3D reconstructions that virtually exhume human remains, thereby offering these long-suffering families a crucial avenue for both mourning and justice. Forensic Architecture, known for its interdisciplinary approach, brings together specialists including filmmakers, architects, and coders to make evidence public across various multimedia formats, particularly where physical evidence is absent or suppressed. Their methodology expands what can count as legal proof, allowing evidence to transcend the confines of the courtroom and enter broader cultural and public institutions. Bones, the central subject of Correa’s film, carry a particular symbolic weight within forensic aesthetics—a substance from which truth, however long buried, cannot be fully erased. Where legal actors make evidence speak before the court, Correa assumes a comparable role as director, with the CPH:DOX festival serving as his forum. Weaving together situated testimonies, fragmented archival footage, and state-of-the-art computer technologies beneath a somnambulistic voiceover, Atlas of Disappearance stands as a striking example of how rigorously forensic documentaries can artfully balance the demands of law and the profound resonance of art, pushing the boundaries of historical accountability and memory. The film is a powerful testament to the ongoing struggle for truth and reconciliation in post-Franco Spain, where an estimated 114,000 victims remain missing, making it the second country in the world with the most disappeared persons after Cambodia.
Against the backdrop of so many sharply political and emotionally charged films, even the selection’s more comforting subjects adopted a concordant, reflective tone. Karl Friis Forchhammer’s Christiania offers a smart, nuanced ode to the eponymous Danish freetown, a unique social experiment founded in 1971. Conceived by young anarchist-idealists who squatted in former military barracks, Christiania set out to build an alternative paradise based on principles of self-governance, communal living, and a rejection of mainstream society.
Forchhammer treats Christiania less as an idealized utopia and more as a "lived contradiction." While he celebrates the romantic force of its radical democratic vision and its enduring spirit of defiance, he is ultimately more interested in exposing the inconvenient cracks that have emerged in its history—issues such as drug use, internal violence, persistent political pressure from the Danish state, and the double-edged sword of a booming tourism industry. Despite a wealth of exciting, rarely seen archival footage that captures the vibrant early days and subsequent decades, the film skillfully avoids lapsing into a didactically nostalgic slideshow. Forchhammer expertly calibrates the viewer’s expectations, regaling us with vivid passages of local legend and essential lore, including figures as improbable and memorable as Rikke, the community’s resident alcoholic black bear.
Christiania also surprises with occasional animated sequences that tip into overgrown fantasy, giving its stories and figures a form they could not otherwise assume on camera, further enhancing its mythic quality. By unsettling the freetown’s crystalline utopian image, the film offers a serious and timely reflection on consensual democracy, questioning the practical limits of total tolerance and humanity’s recurring challenges with open dialogue and collective decision-making. So, even if Christiania can no longer fully uphold its initial utopian promise in its present form, the film may be read, in the context of CPH:DOX 2025’s broader selection, as a poignant warning—a meditation on the fragility of ideals and a subtle foreshadowing of increasingly dystopian times should societies fail to grapple with their inherent contradictions and challenges.
CPH:DOX’s Enduring Vision: A Forum for Global Dialogue
The 2025 edition of CPH:DOX solidified its reputation as a crucial global forum for documentary cinema, demonstrating its unique ability to bring pressing political and social issues to the forefront through compelling artistic expression. From the battlefields of Ukraine and the hidden struggles of China’s youth, to the ethical dilemmas of global surveillance and the lingering shadows of historical injustice, and finally, to the complex legacy of a radical social experiment in Denmark, the festival presented a diverse tapestry of human experience. The selected films collectively underscored the power of documentary to not only bear witness but also to provoke thought, challenge perspectives, and inspire dialogue. By championing filmmakers who blend rigorous journalistic inquiry with innovative aesthetic choices, CPH:DOX continues to shape the discourse around contemporary global challenges, proving that in an increasingly complex world, the documentary remains an indispensable tool for understanding, empathy, and change. The festival’s commitment to showcasing films that are both aesthetically ambitious and politically potent ensures its vital role in the international cultural landscape, fostering a deeper engagement with the realities that define our shared human future.
