{"id":841512,"date":"2026-03-21T22:11:24","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T22:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/841512\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T22:11:24","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T22:11:24","slug":"cphdox-honoree-the-cord-is-one-of-six-pics-in-europe-docs-showcase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/841512\/","title":{"rendered":"CPH:DOX Honoree ‘The Cord’ Is One of Six Pics in Europe! Docs Showcase"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNolwenn Herv\u00e9\u2019s \u201cThe Cord,\u201d which received a Special Mention in the main competition category of Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, also known as CPH:DOX<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tEurope! Docs, which is a collaboration between European Film Promotion and CPH:DOX, presents U.S. buyers with six European documentaries from this year\u2019s CPH:DOX lineup. All films screened as world premieres in the festival\u2019s flagship competition section, DOX:AWARD.<\/p>\n

\n\tNolwenn Herv\u00e9\u2019s \u201cThe Cord\u201d (France)
<\/strong>\u201cThe Cord<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tHerv\u00e9 is an experienced journalist but didn\u2019t want to approach the film in that capacity, instead preferring a personal approach as, she tells Variety, she \u201cwas going through a period of my personal life when I was questioning myself a lot about motherhood,\u201d and she wanted to explore this in the film.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe worked in Venezuela undercover, using local fixers to make many of the arrangements, due to the repressive nature of the regime. \u201cIt was too risky to say, \u2018Okay, I\u2019m a journalist.\u2019 They would follow me all the time, so I wouldn\u2019t have been able to do my job as I did.\u201d Carolina is well connected in her community and acted as a kind of \u201cprotector\u201d for Herv\u00e9, she says.<\/p>\n

\n\tMuch of the film was shot in Carolina\u2019s car as she makes her rounds, which afforded them a level of intimacy, privacy and safety, Herv\u00e9 says.<\/p>\n

\n\tHerv\u00e9 has been in constant contact with Carolina since she last visited Venezuela in May. Since the abduction of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and the subsequent thawing in relations with the U.S., there has been little improvement in the lives of Carolina and her team, Herv\u00e9 says. \u201cMost of them are very cautious, because there has been a lot of repression, and they don\u2019t know what to expect, because in their daily lives, nothing has changed,\u201d Herv\u00e9 says.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRachel Taparjan, director and lead protagonist of \u201cSomething Familiar\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Manifest Film<\/p>\n

\n\tRachel Taparjan\u2019s \u201cSomething Familiar\u201d (Romania, U.K.)
<\/strong>In \u201cSomething Familiar<\/a>,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe film is about hope and overcoming adversity and trauma,\u201d Taparjan says, adding that the focus is on the universal themes of identity and belonging.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMihaela 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn order to understand the context in which their biological mothers put their daughters in the orphanage, Taparjan \u201clifts the lid on the pronatalist policies [in communist Romania] and how that actually impacted the women,\u201d she says. Taparjan wanted to show that their biological mothers \u201cweren\u2019t cold, unfeeling, all those Eastern European tropes. That\u2019s not the case. These women were subjugated. I mean, there was such a restriction on bodily autonomy. I just didn\u2019t really realize the extent of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u201cChristiania\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Tambo Film<\/p>\n

\n\tKarl Friis Forchhammer\u2019s \u201cChristiania\u201d (Denmark)
<\/strong>In \u201cChristiania<\/a>,\u201d 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. \u201cI was cheated of my childhood here, but they were telling me these stories about this crazy place,\u201d he tells Variety.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film explores what the director calls a \u201csocial experiment\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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. \u201cIt\u2019s not always a bad thing having to make a decision with someone you disagree with, and someone who you don\u2019t share fundamental values with,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u201cMariinka\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Savage Film<\/p>\n

\n\tPieter-Jan De Pue\u2019s \u201cMariinka\u201d (Belgium)
<\/strong>At the heart of Pieter-Jan De Pue\u2019s \u201cMariinka<\/a>\u201d 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, \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen 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 \u201cwants to escape from this daily hardship,\u201d and Angela, who was \u201csmuggling to earn money and to keep her head above water.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis kind of struggling formed those characters in that they needed to be very flexible, inventive and adapt according to these war circumstances,\u201d De Pue says, and it forces them into a survival mode of existence in a city that had been devastated. \u201cEverybody had to deal with their own traumas, their own personal problems, and, at the same time, had to survive,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u201cAmazomania\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Barbara Arisi<\/p>\n

\n\tNathan Grossman\u2019s \u201cAmazomania\u201d (Sweden, France, Denmark)
<\/strong>\u201cAmazomania<\/a>\u201d revisits footage from a 1996 expedition by Swedish journalist Erling Soderstrom to document the lives of the isolated Korubo people. \u201cThis is probably the most extensive archive that exists of an expedition in the Amazon to make contact with a group in voluntary isolation,\u201d director Nathan Grossman says of his archival material.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen reviewing the 65-70 hours of footage, Grossman says, \u201cI was surprised by how many situations that made me, as a filmmaker and journalist, feel ill at ease.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe film is very critical in one sense of how documentation has been made, and I think we\u2019ve tried the hardest we can to make it the right way,\u201d Grossman says.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe could have made a film with much, much, much more violence, weapons, guns, question about death. There\u2019s so much more of that in the footage, because that\u2019s a lot of what he spent those expensive tapes running on,\u201d Grossman says. \u201cThe film looks at this adventure narrative, and it includes it as one act, and then it re-examines what that means.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u201cArctic Link\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Ensemble Film<\/p>\n

\n\tIan Purnell\u2019s \u201cArctic Link\u201d (Switzerland)
<\/strong>Ian Purnell\u2019s starting point for \u201cArctic Link<\/a>\u201d was a map showing all the internet cables that connected the world. The director says he already \u201chad an awareness that the internet shaped the way I grew up,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tPurnell says that one of the motivations for filming on the ship laying the cable was to make an \u201cinanimate object,\u201d that is, the internet, \u201cfeel a bit more animate.\u201d The footage of the cable also suggests the apprehension the local community might feel. \u201cThe 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,\u201d Purnell says.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the indigenous community in Alaska where he shot, there was an \u201cawareness that it could become a new form of addiction because of the manipulative pull of the internet,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, this apprehension is balanced by an awareness that the internet could bring practical benefits, including those in the realms of commerce, medicine and education.<\/p>\n

\n\tAttitudes 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tA 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nolwenn Herv\u00e9\u2019s \u201cThe Cord,\u201d which received a Special Mention in the main competition category of Copenhagen Intl. Documentary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":841513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[240386,64843,2000,299,5187],"class_list":{"0":"post-841512","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-cphdox","9":"tag-documentaries-to-watch","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116269461683090995","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=841512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/841513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=841512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=841512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=841512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}