CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, has unveiled the 12 docs screening in its main competition, all world premieres, along with the movies in its various other sections and a focus on human rights for its 2025 edition. One recurring theme is also the relationship of humans with animals, or “other animals.”
Overall, the program includes more than 200 films, 94 of them world premieres, 68 of them feature-length. The fest’s theme “Right Here, Right Now.”
Topics covered by competition films include a 12-year-old boy defying his parents’ alcohol abuse (in Monica Strømdahl’s Flophouse America), a Chinese boy discovering the power of poetry (Deming Chen’s Always), Jens Stoltenberg’s last year as Secretary General of NATO (Tommy Gulliksen‘s Facing War), and a mother, soldier and filmmaker documenting her thoughts from the Ukrainian frontline (Alisa Kovalenko’s My Dear Theo).
Out-of-competition world premieres include Ai Weiwei’s Animality, which explores “our relationship with animals,” and Nathan Grossman’s Climate in Therapy, whose synopsis reads: “Seven climate scientists meet in a godforsaken meeting room to engage in circle therapy about their shared climate anxiety.”
In the Next:Wave program for emerging doc makers, films include Kristina Shtubert’s Abode of Dawn, documenting “10 years in a Christian cult in the Siberian wilderness,” Unanimal, narrated by Isabella Rossellini and from directors Tuva Björk and Sally Jacobson who explore “the complex relationship between humans and other animals,” Gaspard Hirschi‘s I Am Night at Noonday, in which “Don Quixote is resurrected in Marseille and sets out to fight fences, gates, private property rights and general segregation with his faithful squire, an ex-criminal pizza delivery man on a scooter,” and Tova Mozard’s ILoveRuss, whose synopsis reads: “Two artistic souls meet on the outskirts of Hollywood and a 20-year friendship is born. Illusions and realities are challenged while a raw and intimate film emerges.”
CPH:DOX takes place in Copenhagen March 19-qa30.
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