CPH: Science film festival

When the online part of CPH: DOX (Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival) goes on the air from 22-31 March 2024, IDA will present the ambitious CPH:SCIENCE programme. The films selected all investigate issues related to technology, digitisation, climate, and science.

As an IDA member, you can get free access to a selection of films from the CPH:SCIENCE online programme.

The science programme forms a central pillar of the internationally acclaimed documentary film festival. The focus is on research and researchers in a selection of documentaries zoom in on everything from screen time to glaciers, vulnerable food systems, and the green transition. 

Based on documentaries, CPH:SCIENCE seeks to create an understanding of the importance of technology and science in our everyday lives. At the same time, CPH:SCIENCE will investigate how technology and knowledge can be used to solve contemporary challenges and find tomorrow's opportunities.

See the full programme for CPH:DOX here

Eternal You

In capitalism, supply and demand rule, and nowhere is the demand greater than when it comes to escaping death. And with new developments in artificial intelligence, eternal life may become a real possibility. At least if you ask the radical tech entrepreneurs who are offering those left behind the chance to talk to their deceased children, parents or partners. Reality overtakes ‘Black Mirror’ in a documentary that uncovers the booming market of AI companies trying to turn immortality into a product. From haunted chatbots to a heartbreaking VR encounter between a mother and her deceased daughter, opportunities (and moral grey areas) abound for those willing to pay. ‘Eternal You’ is a refreshingly sober tech reportage that never shies away from the ethical dilemmas raised by the sci-fi optimism in Silicon Valley.

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Low-tech

Technological development is like a car without brakes. It roars headlong down the motorway and everyone has forgotten where it was going. It’s a thought experiment that drives the green utopians of the low-tech movement. Aboard a yellow hippie bus, they visit local repair cafés, innovative car manufacturers and organic farms, all of which are devising different solutions to our technological overconsumption.

They are part of the low-tech movement that has been dubbed the third industrial revolution, which seeks to re-establish our relationship with the technology around us. Because maybe it is not necessary to replace your home printer every two years after all. And maybe the utopians of ‘Low-Tech’ are actually the realists of the modern world. They have realised that we can’t keep overspending as we do now, and they have a solution to the problem.

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The Cloud People

In Barbados in the Caribbean, they are feeling the effects of climate change harder than the rest of us. Brutal storms have increased over the past several years, making the island a living hell for its residents. But on the other hand, the island has become a paradise for the many climate scientists who flock there to study the complex weather systems and observe the clouds in the sky. The scientists’ scientific joy is contagious, for example, when they finally succeed in measuring the depth of a cloud with Bob Marley on the loudspeaker.

Clouds are the visible part of a much larger system that we have difficulty understanding and which has fallen fundamentally out of balance. With an evocative and poetic voice-over, the clouds give rise to larger existential questions about what science can tell us about living on earth and what role the clouds will actually play in the climate crisis. Spliced together with poetry, history and science, ‘The Cloud People’ is a film that will make you look up and change the way you look at the sky and its inhabitants.

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Magic mud

The agricultural soil in your country determines your fate. It is the root of much of the world’s inequality, according to Greenlandic star geologist Minik Rosing. In many tropical countries, for example, the soil yields 20-30 per cent less than in Denmark and North America. But the solution may lie in something as humble and untapped as a mud puddle in Greenland. This is the hypothesis of the geologist who has assembled an international superhero team of soil scientists, agronomists and biologists to investigate how the so-called glacial flour can be used to cultivate more sustainable agriculture in tropical countries. It’s awe-inspiring to follow the patient scientific process from the first test mud being collected with a soup spoon tied to a broomstick, to the lab’s petri dishes, Funen cabbage fields, maize cultivation in Ghana and even an Olafur Eliasson exhibition in Versailles.

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The unfair body fight

I wish I was five kilos lighter than I am now, thinks director Mette Korsgaard. She wants to lose weight – just a little. It’s been like that for many years. In fact, almost all her life. In her youth, the body ideal was Barbie, Twiggy the model and Olivia Newton-John, and now that she’s grown up, it’s still the same. So at the start of a new year, she goes all in and tries a number of different diets to find out why it’s so hard to lose weight without putting it back on.

Powder diet, pill diet, exercise diet. Over the course of the year, the instructor tries them all and, together with two researchers, investigates how the body and brain react along the way, providing completely new insights. A personal investigation into mankind’s destructive obsession with weight loss and excessive focus on kilos rather than health..

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Food Inc. 2

Organic food is taking up more and more space on supermarket shelves and local vegetable markets are popping up in more and more neighbourhoods. But there are also more and more people on the planet, and 15 years after the Oscar-nominated mega hit ‘Food Inc.’, it turns out that the modern food industry still needs a thorough overhaul. This is exactly what we get here, and you don’t need to have seen the first film to understand just what an incredible impact agriculture and the food industry has not only on what we eat, but on the world around us. Directing duo Melissa Robledo and Robert Kenner uncover everything from monopolisation, lobbying and the logic of capitalism to what exactly happens in your brain when you eat a McDonald’s burger. But they also look at possible solutions and what the kitchen of the future might look like.

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Can't feel nothing

A man lies in bed illuminated by the blue-white light of his mobile phone. On the doom timeline, he scrolls past cute pets, outraged opinion pieces and creepy images from the world’s hotspots – and he feels absolutely nothing. ‘Can’t Feel Nothing’ begins when director David Borenstein realises, much to his own surprise, that he himself has become a screen zombie. With great curiosity and refreshing humour, he travels the world to investigate how bad things really are.

Who is pulling the strings when the internet makes us angry, sad, horny or just plain indifferent? And is there any way back? Borenstein meets an American internet troll, a burnt-out superstar in the Asian influencer industry, a cynical fake-news factory in Eastern Europe, Russian state propagandists and an online dominatrix who forces her male customers to punch themselves in the groin. An alarming and serious contemporary diagnosis, with the energy to also look at solutions.

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