This year’s edition of CPH:DOX (March 11–22) was as usual jam-packed with exciting discoveries. And unlike the Oscars, which aired the first weekend of the fest, many of the eventual doc award winners, competing in six categories, were well-deserving of those accolades. (Sorry Denmark, but I’ll choose The Perfect Neighbor or The Alabama Solution over Mr. Nobody Against Putin any day.) And three sections in particular showcased runaway stunners: the flagship DOX:AWARD, the emerging filmmakers-focused NEXT:WAVE, and the prestigious (International Federation of Film Critics-awarded) FIPRESCI.
World-premiering in the main international competition, Dongnan Chen’s Whispers in May, a coming-of-age drama set in the scenic and remote Liangshan Mountains, was a no-brainer to take top prize. As ingenious in structure as it is simple in premise, the beautifully-crafted film follows 14-year-old Qihuo and her two BFFs as they embark on a folktale-inspired road trip – by foot and overnight – to obtain a garment for her “Changing Skirt” ceremony, a rite of passage at the onset of menstruation. Lingering in the uncertain limbo between the end of childhood and the beginning of womanhood, Whispers in May likewise combines observational documentary with an “improvised fiction” developed with its protagonists. Which in turn allows these youngsters to both shape and escape day-to-day lives filled with everything from the usual gleeful gossip about boys, to over-the-phone quarrels with a migrant laborer parent toiling far away. It’s a cinematic farewell gift of female empowerment before the twin obligations of work and marriage snuff out the last childhood dreams.
Irene Bartolomé’s Dream of Another Summer, which took top honors in the NEXT:WAVE competition, is an auspicious debut from a Barcelona-born, Beirut-based director. Overflowing with painstaking artistry, the film’s every image is exquisitely framed. (Even the turning of the pages of a photo book feels poetic.) And with a haunting sound design that effortlessly interweaves the ambient soundtrack of Beirut, Dream of Another Summer even seems to drift to the languid rhythm of its hot summer setting.
And like both the city and the unseen protagonist’s own psyche after the port explosion of August 2020, it’s endlessly fractured. In (Spanish) VO we hear that upon awakening from a dream, “my heart ached with the memory of having just drowned.” Later we learn that the port fallout continues, including the risk that one day its remaining grain silos “will look like an abstract sculpture” and no one will remember what had happened, as an investigator discloses to our main character Alicia over the phone. Then again, if these circular monoliths survive as ruins they could also be “traces of our civilization.” Indeed, Dream of Another Summer often feels like a poignant attempt to grasp at those ever elusive traces like straws.
Finally, the FIPRESCI prize went to a doc that was every bit as surprising as its title might imply. Nathan Grossman’s Amazomania revisits a treacherous – in every sense of the word – 1996 expedition to the Amazon through footage shot by a rather self-satisfied Swedish journalist named Erling Söderström (who seems to have dined out on the images he captured ever since). Three decades ago Söderström traveled to the isolated region to accompany Sydney Pousselo, a Brazilian civil servant then attempting to meet the Korubo tribe in order to broker peace between the uncontacted people and their non-Indigenous neighbors (most of whom seemed to think that territorial integrity and laws against logging didn’t apply to them). That first encounter turned out to be a roaring success. At least according to the side controlling the narrative.
Of course reality is always more complicated, which is where Grossman’s own savvy journalistic investigation begins, as he spends the second half of the riveting film trailing the now older but no wiser Söderström back to the Amazon to meet with the Korubo once again. But what the uber-confident explorer discovers this time is not the “innocent” tribe of his romanticized memories, freed from the constraints of capitalist society, but one that’s had just about enough of the white man’s extractive practices – filmmaking most certainly included. In other words, Amazomania stealthily transforms into a journey into the heart of darkness, as a new narrative threatens to shatter the colonialist fiction the Swedish swashbuckler had built his very identity on.
– Lauren Wissot
