09/03/2026 - With nearly 200 films in this year’s programme, the festival’s artistic director talks about resisting simplification, launching world premieres and paving the way for productive disagreement

Ahead of the upcoming edition of CPH:DOX (11-22 March), Cineuropa spoke with artistic director Niklas Engstrøm about the curatorial philosophy behind this year’s programme.

Cineuropa: You describe this year’s selection as resisting simplification. In a fragmented media landscape, is complexity now a curatorial stance in itself?
Niklas Engstrøm: Well, yes, in a media environment driven by speed, outrage and binary positioning, insisting on complexity is no longer neutral. Simplification is doing real damage right now – to how we understand conflict, to how we talk to each other and to democracy itself. Resisting it feels urgent in a way it perhaps didn’t before. In a media landscape built on compression, speed and outrage, a festival that insists on slowing down and showing the many angles of the same reality is very important. Not every film is finely nuanced. Some movies are angry, some one-sided, and that’s fine: a film bearing witness to something unbearable doesn’t owe us a counter-argument. What matters is the festival as a whole. Each film is a voice within it, and together, they form a choir – put together by us deliberately in order to sing in dissonance. Truth rarely appears in harmony; it emerges from the friction between contrasting perspectives.

With 53 world premieres in competition, how do you assess risk when launching films into such a politically volatile climate?
The word “risk” suggests that the political climate should determine whether films are shown, but I don’t think that is the right starting point. Documentaries are made precisely because the world is volatile and complicated. If anything, that makes it more important that these movies are seen and discussed now, not later, when the moment has passed and the urgency has faded. A world premiere is not a risk we take on behalf of the filmmakers. It introduces their work into a public conversation – with audiences, critics and other films. In the end, the role of a festival is not to shield films from the world; it is to give them the strongest possible platform to enter it.

The programme strongly engages with democratic erosion and geopolitical fracture. Is CPH:DOX becoming more openly interventionist as a festival?
If being interventionist means actively engaging with the world, rather than passively reflecting it, then yes, we are certainly interventionist, and we always have been, so that’s not new. CPH:DOX was conceived as a cultural manifestation that addresses the most important questions of our time, not just by screening films, but also by surrounding them with debates, conversations, expert voices and, crucially, people who disagree with each other. We believe in the value of curiosity, dialogue and the diversity of perspectives. We don’t have a political agenda, but we do have a dedication to democratic culture, and a conviction that documentary film can broaden horizons and reduce the distance between people.

That’s a deliberate choice because many people are retreating into spaces where they only encounter opinions they already hold. I don’t want to host a festival where people are only being preached to as the converted. At the same time, we need to resist – resist, resist, resist – when politicians start putting pressure on festivals, like what is happening with the Berlinale at the moment. That is the worst kind of interventionism.

DOX:AWARD remains reserved for world premieres. Does this exclusivity strengthen the festival’s identity or increase pressure on your selection strategy?
It definitely strengthens the festival’s identity. World premieres generate energy, critical attention and industry buzz – a sense that something is happening here for the first time. That matters, both for the films and for the festival. But it’s important to say that our main competition is not formally reserved for world premieres. We could include international or European premieres if the selection demanded it. It’s just that this year – for the fourth year in a row – we found we could build a genuinely strong competition, with real formal and thematic diversity, entirely from world premieres. When 3,000 films arrive at our door, we do have options. Does it increase pressure? Well, yes, I guess so. Every selection is a genuine bet on a film that no audience or critic has yet responded to, so we’re saying: “We believe in this before the world decides.” But I think it’s a healthy pressure that keeps us honest and curious, which is exactly where we want to be.

With nearly 200 titles in the full programme, how do you maintain coherence? Is there a curatorial thread that binds this edition beyond the competition sections?
The coherence comes from something that might sound paradoxical: we curate deliberately for eclecticism. Since the very beginning, CPH:DOX has been driven by a desire to explore the boundaries of what documentary is, what it can be and what it might still become. We want the most artistically groundbreaking and formally difficult films, and at the same time, we want the most broadly engaging, popular ones. The further we can push in any direction, the better. To me, that is not a lack of focus, but the core of the whole project.

This year’s curation comes from a dual gaze: looking outward at a world where international law, democratic norms and the rules-based order are fracturing, and looking inward at what that fracture is doing to human consciousness, to empathy and to our ability to perceive reality at all. Our human-rights strand, Right Here, Right Now, maps the outer world, and our new Brainwaves programme maps the inner one. Between them, they frame almost everything else in the programme. Beyond that, there’s something harder to name but equally important: we curate forms, not just subjects. How a film is made is inseparable from what it’s saying. When all of our films sit alongside each other, they’re not just in thematic dialogue, but also in formal dialogue, and I believe that is part of what keeps a programme of 200 movies from becoming just a list.