Red-carpet season is here and it’s a surreal, cognitively dissonant time of the year in terms of the world stage. Everything from film festivals to award ceremonies and fashion weeks have led to a packed calendar of media events over this first quarter. Attention spans and film funding are getting sparser by the second, while the noise is dialling up. How do we stay focused on the culture we should be consuming? Enter CPH:DOX.
While the movie biz is having lots of fun in the fictional realm, reality is no joke. In 2026, we need film to act as an amplification of global majority voices – and that means stories of and from the marginalised, the colonised and the oppressed. We need documentaries.
The annual Danish celebration of this genre – also known as Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival – is one of the world’s leading in this field, set during Oscars week and just before Cannes. Expect none of the distracting fanfare and all of the meaning.
“The films in this year’s competition lineup resist simplification and speed. They insist on complexity, on ambiguity and on the dignity of lived experience”
Stories told here are the future of documentary cinema, and the competition categories come with cash prizes and creative incubation – standout awards include the coveted Dox:Award for feature films and the Next:Wave and New:Vision awards for emerging storytellers. Then there’s its Right Here, Right Now human rights programme, which is accompanied by debates and an exhibition at palatial Kunsthal Charlottenborg – Denmark’s most prestigious art school.
This year’s theme is “A Double Take On A World Gone Mad”, encouraging a much-needed range of perspectives and insights on world events in a bid to inform us better for the future. As CPH:DOX’s artistic director Niklas Engstrøm puts it: “In such a moment, documentary cinema becomes more than observation; it becomes a space for sustained attention. The films in this year’s competition lineup resist simplification and speed. They insist on complexity, on ambiguity and on the dignity of lived experience.”
CPH:DOX launched in 2003 with a programme of 83 films, a figure that has more than doubled to 200-plus this year. And almost half of these are world premieres, with more than 60 feature-length documentaries and a horde of emerging global talent on the line-up, including the names listed below. There are also evenings with the likes of Juliette Binoche, Louis Theroux and John Wilson to look out for, plus an opening premiere 10 years in the making: Pieter-Jan De Pue’s Ukraine heavyweight Mariinka. Safe to say, there’s a lot going on. Which is where this round-up comes in.
As a longtime Copenhagen dweller and occasional documentarian, I’ve been counting down the minutes till this year’s festival. The 2026 lineup is particularly exquisite (and proof that sometimes, less is more – some of these films are no longer than 11 minutes). These are five documentaries you won’t want to miss from CPH:DOX this month...
American Doctor
Directed by Poh Si Teng
What It’s About: Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and former Al Jazeera documentary commissioner Poh Si Teng follows a Palestinian doctor, a Jewish doctor and a Zoroastrian doctor as they leave the US for Gaza and battle to save lives. The film is fast, wide-ranging and deeply impactful, confronting everything from the US’s role in the ongoing conflict to each doctor’s individual approach to politics, as the trio navigate varying temperaments, medical approaches and experiences – all within a warzone.
Why You Should Watch It: It’s a risk-taking rollercoaster that studies common desires, the weight of the US’s role in war and the workers operating within a fragile health system.
You'll Like This If You Enjoyed: Feras Fayyad’s The Cave, No Other Land (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor), or this year’s Gaza’s Twins, Come Back To Me by Mohammed Sawwaf and Colours Under The Sky by Reema Mahmoud. It also evokes great reads such as Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, Night in Gaza: From the Front Line by Mads Gilbert, and anything by trauma physician Gabor Maté.
Daughters of the Forest: Mycelium Chronicles
Directed by Otilia Portillo
What It's About: This sci-fi documentary follows young Indigenous scientists in Mexico protecting their land through the study of fungi. Threaded with (speculative) magical realism and eco-connectivity, these two young female mycologists straddle modern science and the roots of their ancestors, in a sensually heightened and deeply immersive watch about ecological coexistence and deforestation.
Why You Should Watch It: If you’re into ethnobotany, somatic dimensions and the liminal space between science and magic.
You'll Like This If You Enjoyed: It immediately calls to mind the dense but epic read The Mushroom At The End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, the Björk-narrated film The Kingdom: How Fungi Ruled Our World, and Lin Alluna’s film Twice Colonised about Greenlandic Inuk lawyer and activist Aaju Peter’s fight for justice. If you like the sound of this, then be sure to check out another significant premiere at CPH:DOX – The Sandbox by Kenya-Jade Pinto, which is an investigative look at how AI and militarisation are used for modern border control. Finally, those looking for deeper dives on forensic architecture and historical surveillance should mark Manuel Correa’s Atlas of Disappearance on digital mapping and reconstructing the losses from Franco’s horrific regime.
Phantoms
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Why You Should Watch It: The acclaimed Thai director returns with an analogue short, following Tilda Swinton wandering around the Scottish countryside of her family’s home, speechless but for one ghostly sentence weaved between the images. Here, Weerasethakul employs an overlapping technique to a timeless, ghostly effect.
Why You Should Watch It: Much like Apichatpong’s previous films, this is suitably mesmeric: a dream sequence with foreboding realism.
You'll Like This If You Enjoyed: His films Cemetery of Splendour, or anything by Carlos Reygadas or Lucrecia Martel. And if Phantoms sounds like your kind of doc, another short to look out for at CPH:DOX is Aerial by Aida Berisha, an ethereal audio-visual poem following a Sicilian singer wandering volcanic terrain contemplating grief and rebirth. It evokes memories of Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love.
Christiania
Directed by Karl Friis Forchhammer
What It's About: A long-awaited walkthrough one of the world’s most clandestine free towns – Copenhagen’s semi-autonomous neighbourhood that was founded in the ’70s and is a loaded tapestry of radical democracy and convoluted idealisms.
Why You Should Watch It: When in Copenhagen! This is a juicy exploration of a rightfully self-protected zone in the Danish capital, told with love and respect – a must-see for anyone interested not just in Copenhagen culture, but in anarchic lore, inside-outside world tensions, counterculture community and utopia ideals. In the spirit of Christiania, you can attend a 200-person long-table community dinner at the famed community centre Absalon during the festival.
You'll Like This If You Enjoyed: Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Nicholas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy, music by Alrune Rod, Gorilla Angreb and Magtens Korridorer. Other Copenhagen-centric films to catch at CPH:DOX are Cone Unit (Frederik Tøt Godsk), Lynetteholm On Trial (Naja Andersen) and The Tingbjerg Experiment.
I Heard That They Are Not Going To See Each Other Anymore
Directed by Ka Ki Wong
What It's About: Much like the colossal haze of being in love, fiction and reality merge in this candescent Taipei-set debut feature about modern love within a chaotic metropolis.
Why You Should Watch It: If messy but charming interwoven love tales set in a hectic and fast-paced city are your thing. Early reviews bestow this vivid work with comparisons to early ’90s Asian New Wave, and one of the leads – a Turkish migrant wrangling local drunks at their noodle streetside restaurant – is particularly compelling. This is the kind of joyous palette cleanser that every serious documentary festival thrives on including in the programme.
You'll Like This If You Enjoyed: Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna, anything by Sally Rooney, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express. It does touch on the gravity of technological isolation – for those who enjoy diving into the frontier of tech I’d recommend watching Fox Under A Pink Moon next, in which a young Afghan refugee documents her years-long attempt to flee Iran on her Galaxy phone.
Just A Couple More Reccs...
Should you be looking for one last absorbing watch to end the festival on a high note, don’t miss Everyone Is Lying To You For Money, a funny yet harrowing dive into the world of cryptocurrency directed and gonzo-journalled by none other than ’00s heartthrob, Ryan From The OC (that’s actor and author Ben McKenzie). Elsewhere, Denmark’s Bowie-esque rock-pop star Lars HUG presents a playful love letter to his career with a one-off live cinema concert. A must for any music lover.
