▸▸▷▶ NEW:VISION︱CPH:DOX 2026

评语：A ritualistic and dizzying audio-visual poem, following singer Lei Lowe on an eruptous pilgrimage through ancient Sicilian landscapes where she communes with the Earth in search of emancipation. | Springing from a childhood lullaby written by Lei’s parents, the film grapples with the most intimate kind of archaeology, exploring the relationship between photographer and performer, observer and self. While navigating the volcanic terrain, she becomes characters that reflect and externalise her journey of grief and rebirth in an almost extraterrestrial world. Texture, contrast, and shadows create an abstract dialogue between the viewer and the film’s ethereal nature. An amorphous love-letter to cinema, which weaves in elements of horror, sci-fi and documentary.

评语：Performative video work recorded in an underground tunnel, where an artist explores authority and obedience. | Max Göran, the artist or director or performer, walks into a tunnel that doubles as a film set, or maybe just itself. She tests out a story told by a friend: a Finnish scientis once smeared his face with blood and let wolves lick it, to prove they weren’t dangerous. But the storyline slips. A routine won’t go right. An off-screen voice, part director, part overbearing mother or maybe witch, demands another take. Pre-takes and after-takes become the thing. Wolves finally arrive. Somewhere between rehearsal and dream, the work turns into something else: about conventions of contemporary art, video art, about sex (as in sex), about dissolving borders of subjectivity, friendship and obedience, about what counts as ‘real life’ when it happens inside the dreamworld of a camera.

评语：The earth beneath Paris is a twilight world of fungi, data centers, and secret communities that meet in silence beneath the city. An underground network of connections is mapped out in a dark film. | Deep beneath Paris, a network of connections opens up. Here we encounter a dark world of fungal spores, data centers, and secret communities that silently explore the tunnels in stark contrast with the cosmopolitan ‘City of Lights’ above ground. Joséphine Privat’s film explores and maps the material conditions of the urban world we know. A parallel and almost cosmic universe submerged in eternal darkness.

评语：After years of silence, the director and his friends return to fragments of a shared youth shaped by imprisonment, revisiting memory, friendship, and the images that refuse to settle. | Years after experiences of interrogation and imprisonment, the director gathers his close friends to return to fragments of a past that never fully passed. Together, they look at images and moments once sealed away, not to reconstruct events, but to sense what still lingers. As memories surface through scars, dreams, humor, and silence – and through obsolete technology – the film traces a shared attempt to make space for one another, and observes how trauma lives on in the body and in everyday life. Some images return clearly; others remain unstable, fading or breaking apart. Rather than filling these gaps or moving past them too quickly, ‘Compact Disc’ stays with them—searching for what might emerge when unspeakable moments are allowed to exist, held collectively, without demand for resolution.

评语：A fragmented love, a fallen system, a drifting city: in the quiet unrest of Hanoi’s youth, memory flickers; tired, persistent, and endlessly returning. | In contemporary Hanoi, haunted by the echoes of an unfinished love between a Vietnamese worker who left for East Germany in the 1980s and the woman who stayed behind, what remains after the collapse of an ideology lingers in faltering bodies, muted gestures, and misty corners. Echoes of the past ripple through a drifting generation: an inherited fatigue, a quiet unrest, a looping refrain, a trembling future. Kieu Anh Phuong Nguyen’s film is a slightly melancholic and deeply atmospheric story told in elliptical black-and-white images.

评语：A cinematic diary from the West Bank and the Golan Heights – places caught between occupation, oppression, and a lived, collective experience. | A film diary, dispatches from a place that both does and does not exist – a state in waiting, a geography beyond, but permanently besieged by, conflict, the sites of pressured being and the willed spaces of dream, desire, imagination and resistance. Filmed in the Occupied West Bank and Occupied Golan Heights as part of the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s ‘Ways of Traveling’ Residency 2020 – 2023 (inspired by John Berger), ‘here and not here’ seeks a poetics of expression that acknowledges the perennial challenges of Occupation while refusing the imposed, pejorative, partial and reductive mediatised definitions of a people under constant and escalating oppressions. Charting encounter – with and between people and place and the more than human – here and not here celebrates not the ‘cruel optimism’ of a false hope but rather celebrates the lived experience of a profoundly precious yet always precarious ‘everyday life’.

评语：A beautiful Colombian film that draws parallels between native bee species, the country's colonial past, and a female biologist's family history. | The images feel as organic as the world that Colombian artist María Rojas Arias captures with her analog film camera in her beautiful and suggestive film ‘Jirapo’. A film that draws original connections between a woman’s studies of a species of native bees that have existed in tropical areas since before the European invasion of America, to the country’s colonial past. During one of her excursions, she discovers several of these nests in the cemetery where her ancestors are buried, raising questions about the relationship between human death, the body, violence, and resistance.

评语：An elegant and thought-provoking film shot in graceful black-and-white images that move from room to room in an exploration of location, architecture, and monuments. | Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, ‘Local Sensations’ opens a loose, playful dialogue with Chatri Prakitnonthakan’s essay, ‘How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine’. Rather than illustrating the text, the film generates pluralities – unraveling the dichotomy of object and subject – and gestures toward a kind of topological politics. Though it circles around ideas of monuments, monumentality, and sanctification in Thai society, no statues or literal monuments ever appear. Instead, the film drifts through an arborist’s walking tour, a glassblowing workshop, a drawing game among architecture students, a multi-instrument improviser, a recreation center with its non-human inhabitants, and a snow town in a theme park.

评语：His father's diaries from his final months in hospital, minimalistically staged by artist Ed Atkins and by Steven Zultanski as a performative film in two acts. | When Ed Atkins’ father was in hospital for the last six months of his life, he kept a meticulous diary. An intimate document about physical decline, social life in the hospital, medical bureaucracy, and love. Together with Steven Zultanski, Atkins has staged his father’s diaries in a performative film in two acts: one long and one short. It all takes place in a simple but enigmatic scene in a living room. | Here, the eminent actor Toby Jones reads the diaries aloud from beginning to end with carefully measured diction and distance. His audience is his wife (played by Saskia Reeves) and a small group of young listeners. The second act builds on a game that Atkins plays with his daughter, in which she pretends to be sick and demands the most incredible, magical treatments. Both the diary and the game were originally private creations, even though their existence presupposes the imagination of an audience. The film makes this fantasy literal by staging them in front of an audience and by focusing as much on the faces of the audience as on the performers themselves. The work was created for Atkins’ recent exhibition at Tate Britain.

评语：Pacífico is the name of a region, but also that of a force. A land where music accompanies life, where one can be reborn. | In the waters of Colombia’s Pacific coast, life is celebrated through a particular kind of song: the Arrullos. This music honors life in a territory marked by violence and armed conflict, where enslaved people once found refuge at the end of colonial rule. In these same waters, each year, thousands of whales arrive from Antarctica to give birth. Pacífico weaves a polyphonic narrative around birth in an aquatic space where body, territory, and memory are deeply intertwined.

评语：Onyeka Igwe’s new film work is a post-colonial analysis that unfolds the complex history of a university in Nigeria, built under imperial rule. | The University of Ibadan was created in 1948 in south western Nigeria to produce docile and compliant colonial subjects, there to serve the interests of the imperial core. Post national independence, it flourished – proffering a new image conjugated by Nigerian thought and culture for a brief and bright moment. But then war came, British funding was withdrawn, and Nigeria’s economic independence was funneled into Western mandated streams, draining the university of its promise. At the same time it is the protagonist in a real life fairytale of social mobility that provides many the opportunity to assert an identity in contradiction to a predestined path. Allowing for self possession, mobility, independence and new horizons.

评语：Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film featuring Tilda Swinton visits her at her family's home in the Scottish countryside, allowing two images to overlap in a simple but immensely suggestive gesture. | Tilda Swinton wanders around her family’s home in the Scottish countryside. The familiar (and very beautiful) surroundings envelop her with a slight aura of something foreign and unreal, while with just a single sentence she intervenes in the stream of luminous images and gives them a whole new, inner meaning. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work is shot on analog film and consists of a simple but immensely effective technique of allowing two separate images to overlap, thus evoking a ghostly atmosphere of timelessness in the classic and elegant rooms. The work was originally created as a double-channel installation for the exhibition ‘Tilda Swinton – Ongoing’ at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam.

评语：Connecting traces of hypnagogia, fragmented geography and childhood sci-fi media, through senses of time belonging to translucent dreams, shadows, fantasies and family owned workshops. the images drift into the peripheral glimmers of a nocturnal city and slip into another world. | The film follows an unidentified ghostly entity that travels through nocturnal shimmer. It is an ‘egregore’, a collective being formed by unconscious memories. Inspired by 1980s and 1990s Chinese children’s science fiction media, the film reimagines electricity not just as infrastructure, but as a living force. The images drift through the peripheral glimmers of a nocturnal city, where unfinished imaginings of the future slip into another world.

评语：Over two long summers, this film spends time at a community park in London and asks what it means to celebrate, play, and belong amid the rubble of empire. | Public space is an ideal, democratic place – at least in theory. Artist couple Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah (‘And Still, It Remains’, CPH:DOX 2024) test this theory in practice in a participatory video work, filmed in a London park at a time when censorship and suppression of critical voices are on the rise – and when collective historical memory of the imperialist and colonial background of the places and spaces we know and share is simultaneously fading. | Aburawa and Shah strike up conversations with visitors to the park, and out of the rubble of imperialism, an image of a community across differences nevertheless emerges. With filmmaking itself as a condition for the social situation being documented, ‘The Park (Dancing on the Rubble of Empire)’ is an open and horizontal work that arises from the communal contributions.

评语：A silent visual poem dedicated to the artist's grandfather, who seeks answers and finds new questions in the organic surroundings. | With simple means and great poetic power, Hira Nabi has created a silent visual poem – a cinematic letter told through subtitles – to her grandfather. In beautiful 8mm film images, we move through unnamed landscapes, botanical gardens, and forests while a deep red sun hangs low on the horizon. Nabi seeks kinship with familiar and unfamiliar plants, recalls childhood memories, and reflects on a contemporary world of violence and war. ‘They (no longer) remember’ is a cinematic work that lets the world and its light flow through itself as it moves along highways, rivers, and hidden paths.

评语：Vika Kirchenbauer’s essayistic video work examines the political currents in contemporary Germany, where censorship of critical voices is becoming increasingly repressive. | At a time when elements of fascisation are becoming ever more apparent, ever more pervasive, artist Vika Kirchenbauer takes a personal look at what is in the air in Germany today. Her new essay video witnesses the historical present as a condition marked by vectors of violence that have continuously and habitually existed, and puts its focus on the fault lines that have most explicitly exposed the illiberal underbelly of a liberal state and society in recent years: Palestine solidarity as well as queer and trans rights.

评语：Field recordings of the Atacama desert of Chile and analogue 8mm images explore the grainy, silent textures of sand, dust and noise. | Sound and film artist Anne Gry Friis Kristensen’s new film work was created in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where the sound recordings were made on location in parallel with the film’s grainy, analog narrow-gauge images. ‘ti y l tt e dr ps of sp c ‘ (which, if you allow yourself to fill in the blanks, can be read as ‘tiny little drops of space’) is a sensory, site-specific work that explores the tactile qualities of sand, dust, and noise in the barren landscapes. An audiovisual experience that uses moving images – and not least sound – as its magical medium to recreate the desert within ourselves.

评语：A performative work of fiction set in a contemporary time, where both reality and fiction itself crack open in small, unsettling ways as a couple attempts to help an absent friend move house. | A couple has agreed to help a friend arrange a move. But the friend has dropped out of the project, leaving the couple and their baby on an increasingly chaotic journey through an unnamed American city. Visual artist Kåre Frang’s ‘Your Cards are Bleeding’ allows a performative fiction to unfold in the midst of a crisis-ridden reality, allowing both to crack further and further. A disturbing mood report from a contemporary world where our attention is constantly challenged by distractions from the insurmountable crises that cannot be suppressed and which – if one attempts to do so anyway – simply transform and reappear in another, ambiguous form.