Nolwenn Hervé’s “The Cord,” which received a Special Mention in the main competition category of Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, also known as CPH:DOX, is one of six European films that took part in the Europe! Docs online showcase at the festival. Variety spoke to the directors of the films.
Europe! Docs, which is a collaboration between European Film Promotion and CPH:DOX, presents U.S. buyers with six European documentaries from this year’s CPH:DOX lineup. All films screened as world premieres in the festival’s flagship competition section, DOX:AWARD.
Nolwenn Hervé’s “The Cord” (France)
“The Cord” centers on a community health worker in Venezuela, Carolina, who looks after the health of pregnant women, trying to make sure they have a safe child-birth in a country where the healthcare system has broken down.
Hervé is an experienced journalist but didn’t want to approach the film in that capacity, instead preferring a personal approach as, she tells Variety, she “was going through a period of my personal life when I was questioning myself a lot about motherhood,” and she wanted to explore this in the film.
She worked in Venezuela undercover, using local fixers to make many of the arrangements, due to the repressive nature of the regime. “It was too risky to say, ‘Okay, I’m a journalist.’ They would follow me all the time, so I wouldn’t have been able to do my job as I did.” Carolina is well connected in her community and acted as a kind of “protector” for Hervé, she says.
Much of the film was shot in Carolina’s car as she makes her rounds, which afforded them a level of intimacy, privacy and safety, Hervé says.
Hervé has been in constant contact with Carolina since she last visited Venezuela in May. Since the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and the subsequent thawing in relations with the U.S., there has been little improvement in the lives of Carolina and her team, Hervé says. “Most of them are very cautious, because there has been a lot of repression, and they don’t know what to expect, because in their daily lives, nothing has changed,” Hervé says.
Rachel Taparjan, director and lead protagonist of “Something Familiar”
Courtesy of Manifest Film
Rachel Taparjan’s “Something Familiar” (Romania, U.K.)
In “Something Familiar,” British-Romanian filmmaker and academic Rachel Taparjan and Mihaela, who were adopted from the same Romanian orphanage, embark on a search for their lost biological families.
“The film is about hope and overcoming adversity and trauma,” Taparjan says, adding that the focus is on the universal themes of identity and belonging.
“Mihaela and I started this journey not knowing what we would find, but there was the drive to find out who we are, where we came from, and some of the circumstances around why we ended up in an orphanage in Romania.”
In order to understand the context in which their biological mothers put their daughters in the orphanage, Taparjan “lifts the lid on the pronatalist policies [in communist Romania] and how that actually impacted the women,” she says. Taparjan wanted to show that their biological mothers “weren’t cold, unfeeling, all those Eastern European tropes. That’s not the case. These women were subjugated. I mean, there was such a restriction on bodily autonomy. I just didn’t really realize the extent of it.”
“Christiania”
Courtesy of Tambo Film
Karl Friis Forchhammer’s “Christiania” (Denmark)
In “Christiania,” Karl Friis Forchhammer looks back at over 50 years of the titular self-governing commune in Copenhagen. The director was born there, but his parents moved out the same day, so the film is an homage to a neighborhood that the director never lived in, until recently when the community offered him an apartment there. “I was cheated of my childhood here, but they were telling me these stories about this crazy place,” he tells Variety.
The film explores what the director calls a “social experiment” and asks the question: what are the limits of tolerance? For Christiania, this was not a theoretical exercise but something that had profound consequences. The tolerance of drugs use led to dealers using Christiania as a base for selling drugs and in turn that led to violent battles by biker gangs for control of that business.
The film also looks at how the residents use community meetings to decide on local matters, during which a consensus has to be reached rather than using a majority vote. “It’s not always a bad thing having to make a decision with someone you disagree with, and someone who you don’t share fundamental values with,” he says.
“Mariinka”
Courtesy of Savage Film
Pieter-Jan De Pue’s “Mariinka” (Belgium)
At the heart of Pieter-Jan De Pue’s “Mariinka” are four brothers, orphans, two of whom are fighting on opposite sides of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. But the film is not about the war per se, De Pue says, “It’s about young people who are trying to survive in a war, but it goes far deeper and also highlights the divisions within families even before the full-scale invasion in 2022.”
When De Pue started shooting footage for the film in 2017, the focus was on the four brothers, but over time, it expanded to include two young women, Natascha, who is a paramedic, but is also trying to become a boxing champion, and “wants to escape from this daily hardship,” and Angela, who was “smuggling to earn money and to keep her head above water.”
“This kind of struggling formed those characters in that they needed to be very flexible, inventive and adapt according to these war circumstances,” De Pue says, and it forces them into a survival mode of existence in a city that had been devastated. “Everybody had to deal with their own traumas, their own personal problems, and, at the same time, had to survive,” he says.
“Amazomania”
Courtesy of Barbara Arisi
Nathan Grossman’s “Amazomania” (Sweden, France, Denmark)
“Amazomania” revisits footage from a 1996 expedition by Swedish journalist Erling Soderstrom to document the lives of the isolated Korubo people. “This is probably the most extensive archive that exists of an expedition in the Amazon to make contact with a group in voluntary isolation,” director Nathan Grossman says of his archival material.
When reviewing the 65-70 hours of footage, Grossman says, “I was surprised by how many situations that made me, as a filmmaker and journalist, feel ill at ease.”
“The film is very critical in one sense of how documentation has been made, and I think we’ve tried the hardest we can to make it the right way,” Grossman says.
“We could have made a film with much, much, much more violence, weapons, guns, question about death. There’s so much more of that in the footage, because that’s a lot of what he spent those expensive tapes running on,” Grossman says. “The film looks at this adventure narrative, and it includes it as one act, and then it re-examines what that means.”
“Arctic Link”
Courtesy of Ensemble Film
Ian Purnell’s “Arctic Link” (Switzerland)
Ian Purnell’s starting point for “Arctic Link” was a map showing all the internet cables that connected the world. The director says he already “had an awareness that the internet shaped the way I grew up,” so he wanted to explore how a community that had yet to be connected to the worldwide web would view the prospect of its arrival.
The film moves between a fiber-optic cable-laying vessel and a remote Alaskan community where hopes for the benefits promised by the arrival of an internet connection exist alongside fears of the ill-effects of the online world.
Purnell says that one of the motivations for filming on the ship laying the cable was to make an “inanimate object,” that is, the internet, “feel a bit more animate.” The footage of the cable also suggests the apprehension the local community might feel. “The internet cable that goes beneath the ocean became a kind of creature, so we often refer to it as a snake going through the territory,” Purnell says.
In the indigenous community in Alaska where he shot, there was an “awareness that it could become a new form of addiction because of the manipulative pull of the internet,” he says.
However, this apprehension is balanced by an awareness that the internet could bring practical benefits, including those in the realms of commerce, medicine and education.
Attitudes among the indigenous community range from a woman who had moved away to the city and then returned to her home community and appreciates the value of the natural world and is concerned about how the internet will disrupt their traditional way of life, to an older man who has no need of the internet, nor any interest in it.
A sub-text to this development is that climate change has caused the ice to recede in the Arctic, which will open up a new trade route through the Bering Strait. This has made the region more important strategically.
