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. American documentary filmmakers 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—found the consensus in Copenhagen was that it wasn’t going to be easy.
Docs about Politics
No summary could ever do justice to what Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez has created through his audiovisual-textual collage Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024). The year 1960, famously called the “Year of Africa,” serves as the political, social, and cultural matrix on which Grimonprez builds his manifold narrative—moving back and forth in time and space, layering sound, image, and text with texture and depth. Now an Oscar nominee, the documentarian comes well-prepared, armed with the quintessential skills of an avid researcher and a seasoned orator, opening new tabs in our minds with each question while anticipating potential criticisms with humility and curiosity. Documentary magazine sat down with Grimonprez to discuss Soundtrack to a Coup d’État in his format of choice: a dialogue.
The lineup of the 2025 Sundance World Documentary section was more expansive in its geopolitical interest than last year’s. This year the dissenting subtext assumed functional pointedness, with each work making a broader statement against hostile governments. The theaters went packed and audiences cheered as the snow-clad Park City lent an otherworldly, almost mythical safe space to the independent makers and their works. Although there is speculation of the festival moving out of state in 2027, it is difficult to imagine a setting more suited to Sundance than Utah. The inconveniences, like the high altitude and the extreme dry weather, somehow added to the charm and made me feel, albeit perversely, like I had earned the right to be an attendee.
“It’s South Africa, it’s Vietnam, it’s Jim Crow—it’s like all of these defining moments,” says filmmaker Razi Jafri by phone from East Jerusalem
In 2018, Singaporean filmmaker Jason Soo boarded the Al Awda ( The Return in Arabic) with the intention of making a documentary about the surgeon
In the Winter 2024/2025 cover essay of Documentary magazine, No Other Land’s collective of Palestinian and Israeli co-directors imagine a reciprocal, shared future in front of and behind the camera.
I first encountered the work of Milo Rau back in 2020, when his reimagining of the story of Jesus, The New Gospel, premiered in Venice. Set in the
In 1975, an unusual would-be presidential assassin emerged. Sara Jane Moore, a middle-aged five-time divorcee and mother of four, a suburbanite turned
In 2022, experimental documentarian Ben Russell approached the filmmaker and visual artist Guillaume Cailleau about making a documentary, set in ZAD
Phantoms of the Sierra Madre Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes made his name with confrontational documentaries in which he explores the motivations