Arriving in Copenhagen for the CPH:DOX program felt like stepping into several conversations at once: one about daring cinema and another about the city’s tightly wound culinary reputation. Before an evening screening of Barrio Triste—the new project from Stillz via Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD productions that my colleague C.J. Prince praised highly at TIFF—I detoured to a small ramen spot for a quick meal. The bowl that arrived was unpretentious and smoky, and its sensory pull became a private interlude before a night of film. That ordinary pause, between broth and dark theater, anchored a festival experience that constantly shifted between the intimate and the expansive.
The city’s food world hovered over the weekend in a way that felt unavoidable: I ate at Slurp, a noodle bar launched in 2017 by Philipp Ineiter, one of many chefs with roots in René Redzepi’s Noma orbit. Conversations in Copenhagen already reflected a wave of former staffers speaking out about the restaurant industry’s darker culture—accusations ranging from verbal and physical mistreatment to far more serious allegations about conduct. Those revelations have complicated how locals and visitors interpret the city’s celebrated culinary identity, adding a political and ethical cadence to casual dining decisions.
Films that connected the intimate and the global
On screen, the festival favored work that married personal stories to wider systems. Ian Purnell’s Arctic Link stood out for its hypnotic approach to a deceptively technical subject: the film explores deep-sea broadband lines (there are reportedly enough to circle the globe repeatedly) and the campaign to bring connectivity to a remote Alaskan community. Purnell assembles images of ships, cable-laden waters and industrial scale into a collage that feels as tactile as a bowl of noodles—both objects of concentration, both carriers of human intention. For me, it was the most thrilling title in the DOX: AWARD selection; the jury, however, saw things differently.
Prize winners and thematic threads
The festival jury handed the top prize to Dongnan Chen’s Whispers in May, a luminous coming-of-age story set in the Liangshan Mountains that blurs the line between lived experience and constructed scenes. The film follows three charismatic teenage girls as they travel to a nearby village to buy a dress for an impending rite of passage, and in doing so the work questions the boundary between observation and fiction—an example of what hybrid non-fiction films can accomplish when they treat both modes as equally truthful. The choice underlined how CPH:DOX continues to embrace formal hybridity.
Other notable winners
Several other films earned deserved attention: Nolwenn Hervé’s The Cord offers an energizing, human-scale portrait of a women’s health clinic in Venezuela and the people who sustain it, functioning as a kind of time capsule of daily life before the reported capture of President Maduro in January. Nathan Grossman’s AMAZOMANIA revisits Swedish filmmaker Erling Söderström’s 1996 expedition to the Carubo tribe, then persuades Söderström to retrace his earlier journey. The result interrogates the filmmaker’s legacy and the ethical complications of expeditionary cinema, occasionally evoking the eccentric self-mythologizing of early Herzog protagonists.
Nature, labor and regional stories
Otilia Portillo’s Daughters of the Forest – Mycelium Chronicles dives into fungal ecologies with trippy sound design and an equal respect for ancestral know-how and scientific methods, framing the exchange between elders and younger researchers as collaborative rather than oppositional. Jeanie Finlay’s All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea shifts the frame to England’s northeast and traces the collapse of local fisheries, offering a heartfelt, almost pseudo-Loachian study of communities eroded by short-term politics and economic decisions. Both films demonstrate how environmental stories sit alongside labor and cultural survival at the festival’s core.
Audience moments and filmmaker encounters
Some screenings became social events: the European premiere of John Wilson’s The Story of Concrete filled a 650-seat theater, where Wilson’s blend of cosmic worry and oddball humor felt like an extended episode of his How to series. The packed room cheered an onstage conversation with Louis Theroux, who then presented his own challenging film, The Settlers, keeping the late-night energy alive. Meanwhile, Sinéad O’Shea’s All About the Money provided a riveting case study in personality and power. It profiles Fergie Chambers—an heir to a publishing fortune whose online persona and political rhetoric merge into something both charismatic and alarming—through years of footage in a Berkshire commune and in Tunisia, where Chambers pursues unlikely investments. O’Shea’s access feels intimate without exploitation, producing a humane, often hilarious portrait that lingers long after the credits roll.