Academy Award, BAFTA and Grammy winning British director Asif Kapadia joins us to present his latest film, Creature (2022). Capturing a dance performance choreographed by Akram Khan in a way that “succeeds in making dance feel accessible and intimate” (Deadline). Kapadia will discuss this new work and why he pushes himself to try new things.

Independent Spirit Award nominated, Academy Award-winning American documentary filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin, present their new feature film, Wild Life (2023), which tells the love story of Kris McDivitt Tompkins and Douglas Tompkins, and their mission to create National Parks throughout Chile and Argentina. Vasarhelyi & Chin will discuss their approach to getting guarded people to tell their stories.

Award-winning director, producer and writer Roger Ross Wiliams is the first African American director to win an Academy Award. He is having a banner year with the release of a new TV series (The 1619 Project, 2023), fiction film (Cassandro, 2023) and documentary, playing this year at CPH:DOX, Love to Love You, Donna Summer (2023). Williams will discuss how he navigated the different creative and logistic demands of these projects.

Chinese American director and producer Jessica Kingdon was nominated for the 2022 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for directing the documentary Ascension (2021), looking at China’s growing economic progress and increasing economic divide against the backdrop of the pursuit of the Chinese Dream. Today she’ll discuss the journey of making Ascension and what she’s carried forward from that experience in her future projects.

Join us for A DIALOGUE ON CRAFT with the Academy Award nominated, award-winning Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi (Mole Agent, 2020) and recent Sundance Best Directing awardee, Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints. The two filmmakers will have a conversation about their most recent films The Eternal Memory (2023) and Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (2023), celebrating their European premieres at CPH:DOX 2023. How they navigated the deep intimacy their films bring the audiences into, managed to protect and celebrate their characters’ vulnerability, and create transformative, humanistic, spiritual pieces of cinema dealing with human bodies, traumas and healing.

Join us for A DIALOGUE ON CRAFT with visual artist and filmmaker, working across sound, cinema, sculpture, installation and performance, Alison O’Daniel, in conversation with Academy Award shortlisted Ten Meter Tower (2016) directors, Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck, from Ruben Östlund’s Plattform Produktion. Bending cinematic language to portray new stories, they will discuss their meticulous, transcendental image-making, exploring the very nature of film language in their most recent films The Tuba Thieves (2023) and And the king said, what a FANTASTIC MACHINE (2023), featured in this year’s CPH:DOX programme.

Join us for A DIALOGUE ON CRAFT with Emmy-nominated, Sundance winning independent Chinese filmmaker Jialing Zhang, discussing her newest film Total Trust (2023), with the authors of the The Hostage Takers (2023), award-winning investigative journalists and filmmakers Puk Damsgård and Søren Klovborg, whose films are competing against each other at CPH:DOX’s F:ACT Award competition. The filmmakers will discuss ways they obtained access to secret and politically sensitive information, maintained the security of the protagonists and the shoot itself, but also figure out how to use controversial materials and come up with nuanced stories that make the audience consider more than one perspective.

Join us for A DIALOGUE ON CRAFT with the Academy Award nominated Syrian Kurdish filmmakers Talal Derki and Heba Khaled (Of Fathers and Sons) in conversation with Academy Award nominated and Emmy Award winner Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi (5 Broken Cameras), discussing their most recent films Under the Sky of Damascus (2023) and Innocence (2023), featured by this year’s CPH:DOX post their Berlinale and Venezia premiere. The filmmakers will discuss the challenges and creative obstacles of making politically critical films in their war-thorn home countries, whose respective regimes fail in guaranteeing freedom and equality to all its citizens. While the world turns away from the old news, their filmmaking keeps challenging deeply grounded power structures of the status quo.