Amid “Perfect Storm,” International Documentary Business Tries to Stay the Course at CPH:DOX

Kicking off the Copenhagen film festival’s FORUM on Tuesday, March 26, CPH:DOX Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm acknowledged the dire times for the industry–”where all that is solid seems to be melting into air,” he said. Citing the new international order “where rights are wronged and might trumps right,” and new technological, information, and cultural shifts that have upended shared realities and values, Engstrøm called for documentaries to help cut through the haze “in this perfect storm.” 

Indeed, despite the fact that CPH:DOX has emerged as a highly successful and thriving destination for the documentary industry every spring, this year’s event was shrouded by global economic and political turmoil. If previous year’s editions rehashed familiar complaints about financing and distribution woes, this year’s threats were both more urgently physical and existential.

During the early days of the industry conference, there was news of the beating and arrest of Oscar-winning No Other Land co-director Hamdan Ballal in the West Bank. Multiple filmmakers at this year’s pitch forum said they were detained by or expelled from countries they were shooting in, while others from places such as Georgia and Moldova were concerned for their safety in bringing their stories to the conference. Attending journalist Christo Grozev, from the film Antidote, even spoke candidly about Russia’s ongoing attempts to kill him.  

Meanwhile, U.S. Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene, chairing the DOGE hearing on “anti-American bias in public media,” accused the entire U.S. Public Broadcasting System of being “one of the founders of the trans child abuse industry,” and calling for “the complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” 

The hyperbolic claims might have sounded funny if it weren’t for the fact that several European commissioning editors in attendance were also dealing with attacks by new right-wing governments. In the Netherlands, for example, conservative leaders have put in place plans to slash public broadcasters’ overall budget by approximately 20%. 

“You have to fight harder, and you have to fight smarter,” said POV’s Erika Dilday during one of CPH’s industry conversations. “Even though it’s terrifying, it’s also incredibly energizing,” she said. “I’m ready to paint my face, tie a band around my head, and crawl through the mud to try to save our ability to show independent content on public media.”

U.S. Documentarians Seek Relief Through European Funding

If American documentary filmmakers are looking for life preservers in Europe in the face of the “MAGA-ification of U.S. gatekeepers”—as Variety called it in a festival report—the consensus in Copenhagen was that it wasn’t going to be easy.

“I would say almost all of our delegates from Europe were very worried,” says CPH:DOX Head of Industry Mara Gourd-Mercado. “And it’s not just the rise of the right-wing, but the shift away from culture to defense-spending to uphold democracy and shared European values.”

If public funding and democracy have never felt more precarious, Gourd-Mercado saw a noticeable shift toward more private American industry leaders at this year’s conference. While there were fewer representatives from streamers and U.S. public broadcasters—currently caught in limbo as they wait for the latest executive orders and court appeals—there were more commercial producers and company representatives with “actual funds to invest in films,” says Gourd-Mercado, who noted specifically the participation of Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa Pictures, and Double Agent, a recently formed Hollywood-based nonfiction venture, which has helped finance such upcoming big productions as Alex Gibney’s Musk and Raoul Peck’s project about the 2021 assassination of Haiti’s president. CPH veterans Sandbox Films were also a major presence at this year’s Forum with four projects, and looking for more. “They were here, and they were taking meetings, and I think that’s an interesting change from what we’ve seen in previous years,” says Gourd-Mercado.

Attending CPH:DOX for the first time, producer Sarah Mowaswes says she never had a reason to attend CPH before “because all of us have had success getting funding in the U.S. previously,” she says. But this year, she came to the Forum as producer of Maiken Baird’s untitled Forum project about Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, which has Alex Gibney onboard as an executive producer. “When we started the Said film, we got a lot of push back from those in the U.S.—people said to us, ’this is an important topic, but we’re not going to help you’—so we are trying to adapt.”

Mowaswes was heartened by the 26 meetings they took at CPH’s conference. “We got such a warm reception from broadcasters in Sweden, Denmark, and even Germany—which was a surprise to us,” she says. “The European territories were more open to talking about Palestine. It was really 180 degrees from the U.S.” 

Acknowledging that their production may need to cobble together licensing deals of a couple thousand dollars from various countries’ broadcasters—“a mishmash of pennies,” as she calls it—“it feels like we’re going back to the old models,” she says.

During a panel during the festival’s industry conference, Dogwoof’s Chief Content Officer Oli Harbottle heralded the tried-and-true international TV sales approach. “A lot of the new pathways are actually the old established pathways,” he said, citing their success selling Black Box Diaries around the world. “We’ve been doing this for 20 years and the territory-by-territory model is what our business was born out of.”

But Mowaswes was also heartened by other more substantial financing options, such as interest from prominent international sales companies/distributors such as UK’s Dogwoof and France’s Mediawan, and significant funds available to coproductions from places such as Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Al Jazeera, the UK-based Doc Society, and even U.S. entities such as Time Studios and the Ford Foundation.

Diminishing Funds, Continuing Fights

In addition to Mowaswes’s Edward Said project, which won the Al Jazeera Documentary Channel Co-Production Award and a €10,000 prize, this year’s Forum included several other prominent and promising projects: Metropolis, the new film from the filmmakers of butterfly portrait Nocturnes about mosquitos in Manhattan, which won a $25,000 cash award from Sandbox Films; a Norwegian project about Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, who is diligently documenting the devastation in Gaza; and new films from Honeyland director Tamara Kotevska (The Mammoths That Escaped the Kingdom Erlik Khan), Danish filmmaker of Armadillo fame Janus Metz (Rescue), Norwegian Songs of Earth auteur Margreth Olin (Untitled Horse Project), and the ebullient and prolific Mark Cousins, who pitched his latest magnum opus wearing shorts and a T-shirt, the 17-hour Story of Documentary Film. “Can documentary kill fascism?” Cousins proclaimed. “We aim to make a slash!”

With approximately 700 submissions for this year’s CPH:FORUM, which has seen a steady increase in entries over the past three years, Mara Gourd-Mercado says the growth of their own market “indicates the hype, but it’s also the need.” She attributes this need to a mix of factors, from the collapse of Hot Docs’ longstanding pitch forum to diminishing public funding around the world: “Because if teams cannot access funds in their own regions, they have to come to us to find collaborators in other countries and other regions.”

“It’s really important for the documentary community and industry to come together, put our heads together to find solutions and to make sure that there is financing, broadcasters, and platforms for political themes and political films,” Gourd-Mercado adds.

During the “New Pathways to Audience,” panel conversation looking for such solutions,  Jolt.film co-founder Geralyn Dreyfous admitted that in the early stages of their new digital platform, there has only been one successful film out of the company’s initial nine releases. “So it hasn’t been easy,” she said, “but we’re giving filmmakers a chance to continue to make their film available to audiences while they’re trying to negotiate a sale, and collect data and understand where the demand for their film is.”

Equally disheartening was a discussion around “Producing for Success,” which addressed the financing challenges of producing challenging subject matter nowadays. “It’s fair to say this is tough, and it’s getting tougher, and doesn’t matter how many awards you win, or how much experience you have under your belt, the industry is almost impossible for producers at the moment,” said Joanna Natasegara, producer of The Dating Game (2025) and The Edge of Democracy (2019). “Production costs are at an all-time high; the subject matter is getting smaller; we’re algorithmically driven; the streamers are pushing down on the situation they created,” she continued. “I feel very frightened for the future of filmmaking, especially political filmmaking.”

Fortunately for CPH:DOX, Denmark is one of the few European countries where cultural funding has remained strong, and the festival and event itself only seems to be growing in importance as both a market and gathering place for the international nonfiction community. 

“In terms of the festival, right now, we’re in a good spot,” says Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm. “But we as culture institutions really need to fight to keep the importance of culture on the agenda for everyone, because it is the thing that we fight for—preserving democracy and open cultural dialogue—and that will be even more important in the coming years.”

Anthony Kaufman is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to his Substack; film instructor at the New School and DePaul University; and senior programmer at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Doc10 film festival.