Deadline’s Doc Talk Podcast: CPH:DOX Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm On Taking Copenhagen Festival To No. 1

Annika Pham Seven years after showcasing “You Make a Better Window Than You Do a Door” at Visions du Réel’s Short Film competition strand, Lebanese-born Farah Kassem is back in Nyon, this time in the main international competition with her doc feature-length debut “We Are Inside.” Variety was granted access to the trailer. The film was produced by the helmer’s regular collaborator Cynthia Choucair of Lebanon’s Road2Films, in co-production with Qatar’s Al Jazeera Documentary Channel and Denmark’s Good Company Pictures (“Photographer of War,” “Beautiful Something Left Behind”).

Former Venice Film Festival head Marco Müller has been named Artistic Director of Italy’s Taormina Film Fest. 

As award-winning directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss prepared to shoot their new documentary Girls State, they had no way of knowing real-world events would intrude upon the production in a major way. Nor, of course, did their protagonists.

Annika Pham Copenhagen-based REinvent International Sales has closed Spain and Portugal with AMC Networks International Southern Europe, on the Finnish suspense disaster drama “Seconds”, Variety has learned exclusively. One of REinvent’s MipTV highlights, “Seconds,” made a strong debut on Finnish pubcaster Yle this week, according to head of drama, Jarmo Lampela. “It will easily go over the average viewing target,” he said.

Well Go USA has landed North American rights for Dutch action thriller Invasion about a daring military operation in the wake of a hostile attack on the Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curacao.

Annika Pham One of the Nordic region’s biggest providers of premium series, Copenhagen-based REinvent International Sales, will make a splash at this week’s Canneseries festival and MipTV market. For the second consecutive year, the sales, financing and packaging banner has two titles in competition: the Danish drama thriller “Dark Horse”, due to world premiere in the main competition, and the short form Swedish dramedy entry “Painkiller”, which initially bowed at the Göteborg Film Festival. “Last year we had the Norwegian political drama “Power Play” which won best series, and the Swedish romantic dramedy “Out of Touch” in the short form section.

Annika Pham On the eve of the global content market MipTV in Cannes, Viaplay Group’s Vanda Rapti, EVP Viaplay Select and Content Distribution, has offered a confident outlook on the Scandi streamer’s international activities and content sales. The sales executive, who joined the group in 2003, was able to announce exclusively to Variety a string of new deals on Viaplay’s premium Nordic scripted content.

Oscar winner John Ridley has some choice words for Nelson Peltz, the activist investor who’s trying to land two seats on the board of the Walt Disney Co.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Joe Rogan‘s massively popular podcast not only drives millions of listens of his show on Spotify — it also can boost music streams of guests featured on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” too. One of Spotify’s theses behind its investment in podcasts is that they spur higher engagement for the music side of the house: Users who listen to podcasts on average listen to more music, according to the company. Now Spotify has new stats it says demonstrate that flywheel effect as it relates to Rogan’s show, which has more than 14 million followers on the platform.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Bettina Blümner’s “Vamos a la playa” won ArteKino Festival’s European Audience Award at a ceremony co-organized by the iconic French fashion house Chanel in Paris. Held at La Femis, Paris’ prestigious film school, the event also included a conversation with French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski (“Other People’s Children”), followed by a ceremony honoring Blümner and a screening of “Vamos a la playa,” as well as a posh cocktail which brought together film talent, executives and students.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor European Film Promotion has unveiled the seventh edition of the Changing Face of Europe, a section that runs as part of Toronto documentary festival Hot Docs, which runs April 25 – May 5. The section features nine European documentaries, selected by the Hot Docs programming team, that “illustrate and examine a new and contemporary Europe from a cultural, social, geo-political and economic perspective.” In addition to attending the screenings and the festival’s industry program, the directors and producers of the films will be part of on-site and online events organized by EFP, including networking sessions and one-on-one meetings with distributors, buyers and festival programmers from North America. “Kelly – Someone Else’s Dream” follows Estonian freestyle skier Kelly Sildaru.

Naman Ramachandran Artistic director Hussain Currimbhoy and several programmers have stepped down ahead of this year’s edition of Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival. Festival director Heather Haynes will now lead the programming department. A statement from the Toronto-based event said: “Hot Docs has announced that Hussain Currimbhoy stepped down from his role as Artistic Director on March 20th due to personal reasons.

UPDATED, 3:55 p.m.: Without acknowledging them by name, a spokesperson for leading documentary festival Hot Docs has confirmed the departure of “some members of the programming team,” as well as recently appointed Artistic Director Hussain Currimbhoy.

The Flats, a film about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, won the top award at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen at a Friday night, earning a €10,000 prize. 

Annika Pham Coming straight from Sundance with their respective buzzy docs “Power” – a Netflix Original – and “Union,” U.S. director/producer Yance Ford and his Canadian counterpart Brett Story delivered March 20 an empowering talk at Copenhagen’s “Film:makers in Dialogue” session, where they bounced ideas between each other about power structure in American society, capitalism, race and class divides from historical and contemporary perspectives. “Power,” which was competing at CPH:DOX for the Human Rights Award, is a forceful documentary essay on the origin of U.S.

Lise Pedersen The ongoing war in Gaza was high on the agenda at the awards ceremony of CPH:DOX, Copenhagen’s international documentary film festival, with numerous filmmakers calling for a ceasefire in Gaza as they picked up their awards. Opening the ceremony following a concert by the locally-based Middle East Peace Ensemble, artistic director Niklas Engstrøm told the crowd gathered in Copenhagen’s historic Kunsthal Charlottenborg, which is home to the fest throughout the 10-day event: “It felt right to start with this basic human message of hope and peace.” On the theme of conflicts past and present, Italian director Alessandra Celesia picked up the top Dox:Award for “The Flats,” a powerful, timely and haunting film about a community living in the shadow of the pain and trauma of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Lise Pedersen Science is one of the central themes of leading European doc film festival CPH:DOX. Alongside the broad selection of films on offer in the CPH:SCIENCE section, the event also opens the floor to conversations on the role of science docs with key players, ranging from filmmakers and producers to commissioners and public broadcasters.

Less than two weeks after 20 Days in Mariupol won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, another important film about Ukraine has bowed on the world stage.

As David Newlyn Gale reached his mid-80s, he lived in his own home, but not in the most resplendent conditions. He cohabitated with an untold number of mice in a hoarder’s horror of detritus, a place chocked with tins of food that probably fell off store shelves around World War II.

The hummingbirds of Every Little Thing are migrating from North America to Europe. Sally Aikten’s film about the extraordinary avian aerialists and a Los Angeles woman who tends to injured hummingbirds is making its European premiere at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, after initially hovering over Sundance.