CPH:DOX 2024 Reviews: ‘Phantoms of the Sierra Madre,’ ‘The Flats,’ and ‘Black Snow’

Phantoms of the Sierra Madre

Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes made his name with confrontational documentaries in which he explores the motivations of questionable characters, such as in Golden Dawn Girls (2017), which enters the dark and confused world of women from the far-right Greek nationalist party. At one point, he leaves the camera running when the protagonists think it’s off, which results in the most revealing segments of the film. In The Name of the Game (2021), he follows a popular Norwegian politician whose rise is halted by accusations of sexual harassment. Bustnes uses the unexpected access he has been granted to directly confront his protagonist. The ethically dubious but undeniably exciting way he inserts himself into his films is not only a matter of style but the very form of his storytelling. 

This approach is particularly pronounced in his latest documentary, Phantoms of the Sierra Madre, which world premiered at CPH:DOX. This time around, the hero is less obviously negative but similarly misguided. Bustnes attempts to distinguish between the story he is telling versus the one his protagonist wants, disguising his complicity with criticism. But they eventually turn out to be one and the same. 

Tellingly, almost every point made by the flawed protagonist, Danish author Lars K. Andersen, is either accompanied by a self-doubting ethical dilemma or challenged by other characters and the director himself. Indeed, Bustnes leaves the voice-over narration to Andersen, whose words “It was not my story to tell” bookend the picture, working as a protective cocoon. But it additionally begs the question for both the protagonist and the director: why, then, did you decide to tell it? 

At the beginning of the film, Andersen tells us how he has been fascinated with Native Americans since his childhood. This interest first sprouted from watching old Westerns and deepened when he discovered the work of Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad, who in 1937 went to search for a “lost Apache tribe” that fled to the Sierra Madre mountains after Geronimo’s defeat. Ingstad never found them, and almost 100 years later, Andersen is compelled to do what his role model didn’t manage to do. 

Next up, we see Andersen and Bustnes head to New Mexico to meet the Mescalero Apache community. Andersen goes around asking about Ingstad and the lost tribe and keeps running into obstacles; the manager of the local museum has never heard of the Norwegian explorer and actively dislikes Western novels and movies. But soon Andersen gets lucky, and the great-great-grandson of Geronimo, Pius Garcia, answers his call. Garcia, along with Bird Runningwater, former director of the Sundance Indigenous Program, is credited as executive producer, lending Indigenous authorization to the film project. Pius is extremely proud of his origins and invested in his community and heritage, so one motivation for him to accompany Andersen might be to make sure someone less competent doesn’t do it instead. 

As they arrive in Mexico, they keep encountering silence and misdirection. The most aggressive example is a Mexican-Apache anthropologist and intelligence officer who verbally attacks Andersen and Pius for trying in the first place; if this tribe doesn’t want to be found, their wishes should be respected, especially if it’s another white man who wants to tell their story. 

In addition to some people claiming Ingstad was actually after looted gold reportedly stashed away by Geronimo, a scene that questions the filmmaker’s intentions involves two women who also claim to be the iconic chief’s descendants. When Andersen arranges a meet-up with the women and Pius, it plays out like an ugly confrontation straight out of a reality show: Pius blows off the women’s scarce genealogical evidence. This sequence is then followed by another element that is unorthodox for documentary filmmaking: a meta-textual interview in which Andersen speaks to an Indigenous expert whom Bustnes has asked to take a look at the film—but how much of it or which cut is not specified. 

With its lack of temporal clarity within the perceived process of filmmaking, this scene foreshadows the ethical concerns the viewers will inevitably have when the third act comes around. The expert is not named, and only identifies herself by tribal affiliation (Cree-Métis-Saulteaux). When Andersen contends that the confrontation segment is interesting, she responds that it is sad that it is used for entertainment, and that it is finally time for Native Americans to tell their own stories. Andersen counters with the claim that he is telling his own story—that of a Scandinavian explorer. This line of reasoning is legitimate, but it still leaves the white man in the dominant position in a foreign territory. 

Is Bustnes’s decision to keep the scene in the film meant to show that he is just telling the story of his protagonist, thus cleansing his own culpability? In order to fully convey how the structure of the film transgresses ethical boundaries, we here have to resort to spoilers (skip to the last paragraph to avoid them). In a confrontation late in the documentary, Andersen and Bustnes wrangle about concerns of ownership of the story, with the director coming across as the more ethical one, saying that the writer maybe shouldn’t be the main character and that “maybe the Apache should tell their own story.” In an argumentative mood, Andersen claims he has the right to tell this story just because he can, just as a person from the Congo or China would, without ever considering the issue of who has the voice and the tools to tell it. So, while Bustnes goes out of his way to make sure that he is perceived as an objective storyteller who is just following his protagonist’s misguided ideas and actions, the very ending of the film destroys any such illusion for anyone with basic awareness of the nature of documentary filmmaking. 

In the final stretch of the film, Andersen visits the house of Helge Ingstad in Oslo. There, the explorer’s grandson shows him the attic, where trophies and artifacts he had brought from Mexico are stored. Among them is the skull of an Apache woman who is mentioned earlier in the film. Andersen decides to take it to New Mexico so that it can be properly buried after Pius tells him her spirit would otherwise not find peace. So, the documentary ends with this European writer triumphantly righting a wrong of another European from a century ago. But when you think in terms of research for a documentary film, wouldn’t the filmmaker and protagonist start closer to home, that is, in Ingstad’s house, before traveling all the way to the other side of the world? This wouldn’t be the first time that the timeline of an explosive late revelation was manipulated by filmmakers, such as in Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx (2015). So, it is quite plausible that Bustnes and Andersen knew where they were going with the story, and that everything that preceded it in the film was, in fact, reverse engineered.

With all this in mind, it is impossible to escape the feeling of European arrogance inflected with a detached Scandinavian exceptionalism. This is also evident in the cinematic language. Andersen is initially presented as an earnest and somewhat naïve and quirky character. Wide shots of him trudging between rocks and bushes of the Sierra Madre in his European clothes imply he is lost and doesn’t belong there, but with the awareness of the skull scene, it too comes across as faked. In an early scene, in which the museum manager laments everything the Apache have lost, the camera films him in profile, as if he is wistfully looking into the distance, to a soundtrack that grows epic and tragic with distorted guitars and choir, which is hard to perceive as not at least slightly ironic. Furthermore, when we consider the rest of the admittedly elegant score that nevertheless clearly harks back to spaghetti Westerns with a dollop of generic Native drumming and singing, it reinforces the impression that Bustnes actually did what Andersen said in that confrontational scene: he made the film because he was able to, and consciously gave it this ironic European flavor. Whomever they really belong to, stories end up being told by those who have the tools and the voice.

The Flats

The Troubles is the name of the conflict in Northern Ireland between Loyalists and Republicans from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which took more than 3,500 lives. Loyalists, mostly Protestants, wanted to stay in the UK while Republicans, mostly Catholics, wanted to join the Republic of Ireland. Online research reveals that this sectarian conflict is rooted in deep cultural and political differences rather than based on religion, but Joe, the hero of Alessandra Celesia’s CPH:DOX-winning documentary The Flats, would probably beg to differ. “I will proudly die a bigot,” he says about the event that scarred him for life when he was nine years old.  

The structure of the film is simultaneously very complex and freewheeling, with timelines that intermix and protagonists who sometimes play other characters in reenactments, and sometimes are just being themselves, which can be confusing for the viewer. But this reflects that Joe and other protagonists are frozen in a liminal space between the past and the present, just like Northern Ireland itself. Even if not every scene or point the film makes is clear, it successfully paints the big and painful picture of unresolved conflict that resonates to this day and continues to affect its population. 

In one of the film’s first scenes, Joe is filmed in a session with therapist Rita, who works with a suicide prevention organization. The middle-aged bachelor, who lives with his little dog Freedom in the titular towers of North Belfast, speaks about the murder of his 17-year-old uncle Cocke by the infamous Loyalist Shankill Butchers gang. The youngest brother of his mother was shot through the back of the head and the bullet went out through his nose. The way we are affected by traumatic events in childhood is perfectly encapsulated by this detail, and Joe has in many ways remained stuck in this tragic past. He felt responsible for it as children tend to do, and it haunts him to this day. Even his facial expressions when he remembers it give him a child-like appearance, wide-eyed, full of tears and despair but also pride. “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children,” he keeps quoting Bobby Sands, an iconic IRA figure who died after 66 days of hunger strike in prison. 

Celesia re-creates the wake for Cocke with Joe and other protagonists. As Joe helps a young man who plays his uncle step into the coffin in his apartment, the scene has a chilling resonance, which turns into a more mournful key when he gently applies a plaster over his nose. French cinematographer François Chambe’s camera peeks between the bodies of mourners to reveal a young ginger-haired boy standing in the doorway. This is Sean, Joe’s neighbor, who plays Joe’s younger self in several of these re-creations. Celesia goes beyond the traditional method of dramatizations: in a scene which is by virtue of editing and coloring implied to be happening in present day, Sean approaches two soldiers in 1970s uniforms on the roof of one of the towers and pretend-shoots them with his finger. This is what Joe used to do, before he threw his first petrol bomb and later became one of the organizers of frequent riots in Belfast. The soldiers were obviously put there by the filmmakers, but they fit in perfectly—the neighborhood is full of murals defiantly celebrating the IRA. 

Another neighbor and protagonist is Jolene, a talented 30-something singer, who plays Joe’s mum in several scenes. She is instructed on how to defend herself by Angie, who shot her husband in the hip with a gun she hid in her oven for the IRA. Rampant domestic violence and substance abuse are the consequences of the Troubles. We see Joe shouting at drug dealers, his biggest concern that will lead him to a potentially fatal decision, from his balcony adorned with the Irish tricolor as he smokes a joint and shows us his moonshine: “The rest is for my wake,” he says, with a childish flair for the tragic.

The documentary was filmed over a period of seven years and covers the contemporary events of Brexit and the death of the Queen. Through the present-day scenes, the film gives us a clear picture that the conflict, if not directly violent anymore, is still very much present. Celesia further underlines this connection by visually connecting archival material with her own footage. The TV archival are heavily tinged in blue, while Chambe’s footage is washed out, so the grays also appear bluish. As Joe watches an old broadcast report of a clash of Republicans with the British Army and the police, identifying the rubber bullets and petrol bombs by sound, his reminiscence is either reflected on the TV screen or superimposed over the archival footage. Outside of such experimental methods and reenactments, the camera often shows the characters in skewed angles that reflect their confused and traumatized state of mind. This makes it quite easy to sink into the bleakness and dark poetry of the film, which at almost two hours of running time becomes heavily immersive.

Black Snow

Stories of industrial conglomerates causing environmental damage in poorly regulated countries are as much a staple of documentary cinema as they are of investigative journalism—and the overlaps between the two. For instance, in Nanna Frank Møller and Zlatko Pranjic’s The Sky Above Zenica (2024), activists are fighting the global steel giant ArcelorMittal, which has made the titular Bosnian city one of the three most polluted ones in Europe, with at least one cancer patient in each household. In other countries, multinational companies don’t poison their citizens, as the local mining industries do it instead. Such is the story that Ukrainian-born, U.S.-based journalist and filmmaker Alina Simone’s first feature-length documentary, Black Snow, tells. An unlikely hero uncovers the story of pollution in her hometown and gets targeted by Putin’s Russia. Black Snow (an IDA Enterprise Fund recipient) won the F:ACT Award at CPH:DOX.

The film opens in a fittingly dramatic manner, with the protagonist, 42-year-old Natalia Zubkova, recording a video in her car, saying, “If you are watching this, it means I had no strength left or I am simply no longer alive.” Living in the city of Kiselyovsk, in the Kuzbass region in southern Siberia, home to one of the world’s largest coal deposits, she is saving one kidney for her daughter, meaning she would never commit suicide. Her elder daughter had already had one replaced, and her son, who was born in another city, is completely healthy. 

Historical black-and-white archive footage of coal mining follows, accompanied by Zubkova’s voice-over explaining how mine owners discovered that open pits are much cheaper. This alternates with TV archival of Putin surrounded by his minions, including the Kuzbass governor, saying that Russia has to “occupy this niche or someone else will.” 

Black Snow goes beyond the standard investigative documentary format with its dense dramaturgy involving many complex developments from the angle of the protagonist, and the director’s closeness to her. Zubkova isn’t a charismatic personality nor an obvious badass type. Her low profile has the vibe of an ordinary woman, a mother and housewife who disregards her husband’s opinion, making her fight for her children’s and neighbors’ health and social justice relatable. Her headstrong willpower turns against her, but she doesn’t give in even when she is clearly despairing. The way she is targeted is presented in a suspenseful manner, with quick cuts between headlines, social media, and online comments, and crude photomontages from state-aligned tabloid websites creating an almost unbearable tension. The music score switches between dramatic strings with curious acoustic guitar and threatening electronics, building as the film progresses, and slowly decreasing in intensity as the anti-climactic ending approaches. 

Faced with the authorities' complete refusal to recognize environmental issues in general and in her town in particular and the silence of state-controlled media, Zubkova began her citizen journalism by filming plumes of black smoke from open mining pits and interviewing residents, most of whom have serious health problems. In February 2019, her YouTube channel went viral worldwide with footage of black snow. The mayor covered the spots that were smoking, restoring his reputation but not solving the environmental problem.

Black Snow follows her other reporting of carbon monoxide poisoning from former pits and attempts to appeal to ineffectual regulatory agencies and even Justin Trudeau as an environmental refugee. When Zubkova decides to run for the local council, threats against her intensify, with tabloid websites running horrible, fabricated stories about her mental health, supposed alcoholism, and promiscuity. In a particularly scary scene, the Federal Security Service (FSB) stops her and Simone, wanting to interrogate them. Unsupported even by her husband, who works as a truck driver at the mine and hates being filmed so we never see him except pixelated in a brief scene, Zubkova might have to flee. 

If it weren’t for the pit mines, southern Siberia would actually look quite idyllic in the summer, despite “Glory to the miners“ slogans printed and carved everywhere. Although these mottos had a certain purpose during communism, in authoritarian times they have not only turned into a reminder of a bygone era but have also gained a new, sinister meaning. 

Miners are no longer considered heroes. In fact, just like other ordinary citizens, they clearly do not matter to mine owners and authorities. This arrogant disregard for their lives is sickening, but in this, the former communist countries are now equal to their counterparts in other parts of the world—international corporations and their government partners are not even trying to sugarcoat how ideologies are no longer relevant. There is only naked power and profit. 

Vladan Petković is a film journalist, critic, and festival programmer. He is a correspondent for Screen International, senior writer for Cineuropa, contributing editor for IDFA's website, and head of studies of the GoCritic! training program for emerging film critics. He is a program advisor at IDFA, program director at Rab Film Festival, and a programmer at ZagrebDox, and regularly curates for other festivals and events around Europe.