America’s Political, Legal and Cultural Underbelly Explored by Trio of Filmmakers at CPH:DOX

Tuning out the drama! Nick Lachey shared a series of photos with his kids in Hawaii amid his legal woes.

Taylor Swift is surprising local food banks as she plays at sold-out stadiums across the U.S.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Three projects pitched at CPH:FORUM – the industry program of CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen-based documentary festival – have been awarded cash prizes. They are Robin Petré’s “Only on Earth,” Iryna Tsilyk’s “Red Zone” and Yegor Troyanovsky’s “Cuba & Alaska.” The filmmakers were awarded at a ceremony in the Danish capital on Thursday. Petré’s “Only on Earth” garnered the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award worth €20,000 for best pitch. The docu, produced by Signe Skov Thomsen, and Malene Flindt Pedersen, depicts a journey deep into one of Europe’s hottest fire zones, Galicia, where wild horses roam the mountains under the watch of local cowboys. These horses are excellent at fire prevention, but now they are vanishing in the clash between humans and nature.

Oscar winner and Academy member Roger Ross Williams is saying publicly what many in the documentary community have stewed over privately – that the sums of money being spent on Oscar documentary campaigns has “gotten insane.” And Williams, a former Academy Governor representing the Doc Branch, says something may be done about it.

Jessica Kiang In recent years, self-proclaimed Trump svengali Roger Stone has often been compared to DC Comics character the Penguin. Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s “A Storm Foretold,” a wild-ride doc that grants all-areas access to Stone over a three-year period starting with his 2019 indictment and subsequent pardon, suggests this is not strictly fair. For one thing, as the film begins, Stone is smoking the chunkiest cigar you have ever seen, rather than the more canonically acceptable cigarette holder wielded by the cartoon villain. For another, while Stone has more enemies that you can shake a fat stogie at, no single superherohas yet emerged to save Gotham/the United States of America from his brand of preening, gloating arrogance. If he is the Penguin, where the hell is Batman? 

Addie Morfoot Contributor During a talk at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX on Wednesday, Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams spoke about a wide variety of topics, including his latest documentary, “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” how insanely expensive it is to garner a doc Oscar nomination, and why the racial reckoning that occurred in the nonfiction community after George Floyd’s murder is over. Despite celebrity-driven docs being all the rage, Williams admitted that he usually rejects them. “I have so many celebrities who come to me about making a documentary (about their life),” the helmer told moderator Thom Powers. “It’s never worked out because if they are a living celebrity, who is very popular, they are all about control. It’s a piece of propaganda about their image and their career. It’s not a documentary.”

Lise Pedersen Paris-based CAT&Docs has come onboard as sales agent for Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini’s “After Work,” which had its world premiere in the main competition at CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival. Variety speaks to the director at the festival. In this stunningly cinematic doc, lensed by Ruben Östlund’s long-time DOP Fredrik Wenzel and shot in the U.S., Italy, South Korea and Kuwait, Gandini explores the notion of work in the 21st century, as automation and technology free up time, and asks what the future could be like in a work-free society. One of the inspirations for the film, Gandini says, was Swedish sociologist Roland Paulsen’s writings on the ideology of work, which is rooted in the notion of a work ethic developed some 350 years ago.

Whenever the Iranian regime feels threatened by public protest its reflex is to go after two groups: demonstrators, most assuredly, but also artists – especially filmmakers.

Lise Pedersen Los Angeles non-profit The Film Collaborative has boarded Swedish director Tove Pils’ debut feature “Labor,” which is competing in the Nordic:Dox section at the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, CPH:DOX. The film follows Hanna, who leaves her family and girlfriend behind in her small Swedish hometown and travels to San Francisco to explore her sexuality in the city’s vibrant queer scene. She soon meets Chloe, a professional dominatrix, and Cyd, a trans man who works as an escort for gay men. Together with her new friends, she embarks on a journey that takes her further and further away from her life in Sweden. “Labor” was shot over more than a decade, and one of the reasons it took them so long to put the film together was their concern for the protagonists’ anonymity and the effect it might have on their lives, Pils explains to Variety.

Rupert Murdoch just announced that he’s engaged to Ann Lesley Smith, less than a year after finalizing his divorce from model Jerry Hall.

Rupert Murdoch is officially engaged to former police chaplain Ann Lesley Smith.

Imagine not only believing the world is coming to an end, but wanting it to happen. Eagerly. Then, take it a step further and imagine people with such a mentality engineering American politics and foreign policy to bring about the very thing they seek — the apocalypse.

Rupert Murdoch is engaged, again.

EXCLUSIVE: Veteran producer Stratton Leopold (Mission: Impossible III) and filmmaker Dax Phelan (The Other Side of the Wind) have teamed up to produce a new currently untitled limited series based on an infamous 19th-century prison escape known affectionately as The Catalpa Expedition.

EXCLUSIVE: Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Nick Faldo, and Aaron Judge are among the elite professional athletes who have benefitted from working with a sports psychologist. Now some esports stars are catching onto the idea.

Addie Morfoot Contributor When CPH:DOX shifted from a fall festival to a spring-based fest in 2017, it got out of IDFA’s shadow and grew into one of the most influential documentary events of the year. “It made a big jump in prominence when it moved to March because it fit into the calendar in a more exciting way for a lot of documentary stakeholders,” Thom Powers, lead documentary programmer for Toronto Film Festival, says. “It became a great place for films coming out of Sundance to have a European launch. It’s also become a very significant place for films to make world premieres near the beginning of the year, which can then send them on a circuit, traveling to other festivals like Hot Docs or DOC NYC.”

Showtime has unveiled an April 14th premiere date for their documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only, on New York Dolls frontman David Johansen, also debuting a trailer for the pic directed by Academy Award winner Martin Scorsese (The Last Waltz) and Emmy nom David Tedeschi (The 50 Year Argument), which you can view above.

Lise Pedersen Swiss sales agent Lightdox has acquired international rights for “The Other Profile” by French director Armel Hostiou (“Day,” “Stubborn,” “The Invisible Pyramid”), which is nominated for the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival’s top Dox:Award. The film’s starting point is when he discovers the existence of a Facebook doppelganger whose friends are mostly women based in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This other Facebook profile organizes auditions for an upcoming film to be shot in the DRC. After notifying Facebook about what clearly seems to be identity theft, Hostiou receives an answer informing him that it is not a fake profile and cannot be shut down, leading to what he describes as a “Kafkaesque” situation.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Once considered a showcase committed to hybrid documentaries, the CPH:FORUM in Copenhagen has steadily transformed into a four-day event that presents a variety of topics, genres and artistic approaches from a diverse group of filmmakers. While the carefully curated market isn’t fazed by experimental approaches to the form, the industry event also champions traditional docu projects and provides a prominent platform for veteran, mid-career and newbie directors and producers. This year, the financing and co-production event, taking place in the middle of the 20th edition of the CPH:DOX documentary film festival, will feature 34 international projects selected from a record number 478 submissions. According to artistic director of CPH:DOX Niklas Engstrom, the films selected to participate in the FORUM didn’t need to meet a specific criteria, but each project is “important artistically, socially, politically, and culturally.”

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Sales agency Taskovski Films has acquired “!Aitsa” and “Fighters,” which both have premieres at CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival. Dane Dodds’ “!Aitsa” has its world premiere in the festival’s Science Program. The film focuses on the spiritual lives of the inhabitants of South Africa’s Great Karoo desert. This is the place where some of the first humans likely lived. Here, in the Blombos cave, an unearthed piece of engraved ochre represents perhaps the earliest ever example of abstract human thinking. At the other extreme of the Karoo, bordering the Kalahari in the North, the town of Carnarvon is home to one of the biggest science projects in the world, the so-called Square Kilometer Array. Still under construction, the SKA will consist of hundreds of satellite dishes the size of three-story buildings. Its stated objectives are to explore dark matter, dark energy and the beginning of the universe, and search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.