CPH:DOX honours Danish artist Per Kirkeby
- Anne Regitze Wivel’s Man Falling will open the 13th Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, unspooling from 5-15 November
Award-winning Danish director Anne Regitze Wivel’s Man Falling – a portrait of one of Denmark’s most famous artists, Per Kirkeby, who was forced to stop painting by a brain injury after a fall – will open the 13th CPH:DOX-Copenhagen International Film Festival, which runs from 5-15 November.
When Wivel (who most recently profiled her husband, Danish politician Svend Auken, in the 2011 documentary Svend) was contacted by Kirkeby, whom she had known for many years, she had no idea that he wanted her to make a film. But he wanted her to describe how in an instant he had lost the entire foundation of his life as well as the ability to work.
Man Falling – about Kirkeby's universe, “marked by deep melancholy as well as astounding beauty: a personal struggle for life and work, a return to the universal language of painting that has been his way of expressing his visual and emotional impulses” – will screen at Copenhagen’s DR Concert House.
At the world premiere, CPH:DOX director Tine Fischer and CEO of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Poul Erik Tøjner will welcome Kirkeby’s colleagues, including geologist Minik Rosing and artist Tal R, to talk about the artist during an audiovisual show created by Snöleoparden and the Dark Matters collective.
The CPH:DOX-Copenhagen International Film Festival will announce its full programme today (16 October), but it has already made public the 16 entries for the main competition – “films that stand out for their strong, personal vision and their cinematic qualities, justifying the rightful place of documentaries on the big screen”.
Among the contenders are Portuguese director Márcio Laranjeira’s A Girl of Her Age [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Austrian filmmaker Friedrich Moser’s A Good American [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Belgian director Guy-Marc Hinant’s Birobidjan, Norwegian filmmaker Aslaug Holm’s Brothers [+see also:
trailer
film profile], French director Antoine Viviani’s In Limbo, Italian filmmaker Pietro Marcello’s Lost and Beautiful [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pietro Marcello
film profile], Czech director Helena Trestíková’s Mallory, Swedish filmmaker Erik Gandini’s The Swedish Theory of Love, and The Fear of Thirteen and Unseen: The Lives of Looking, respectively by UK directors David Sington and Dryden Goodwin.
Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.
