Nine new international immersive documentary projects have been selected for CPH:DOX’s talent development and training programme, CPH:LAB. The participants will go through an intense development phase and be ready to present their prototypes at CPH:DOX 2024, which takes place in Copenhagen March 13-24.
Since 2009, CPH:LAB has been seeking to advance new visions of what a documentary can be. With an expanded focus, the lab is exploring the potential of interactive and immersive technologies, integrating alternative business strategies and cross-sector partnerships in a new approach to developing stories in the digital age.
The training programme runs as a combination of onsite and online workshops and mentoring sessions spanning from September 2023 to February 2024. The nine projects’ core teams will be working with the Head of Studies, Mark Atkin, and a slate of internationally renowned mentors to create a prototype that will be presented at CPH:DOX in March 2024 in Copenhagen.
’I am really excited to meet this year’s CPH:LAB cohort and to explore with them new approaches to what a documentary can be in the digital era. The CPH:LAB is a place for experimentation and we will all be pushing ourselves in directions that are new to us, under the reassuring influence of our inspiring international mentoring team, who will gently ease us outside our comfort zone and hold us while we are there. The results are unpredictable. We expect change. I look forward to sharing with this year’s cohort where we have got to during the CPH:DOX Inter:Active Symposium in March 2024.
Mark Atkin
The first residential workshop will take place in October 2023 in Copenhagen and the projects will work with mentors from different creative industries: Vassiliki Khonsari, producer and cofounder of iNK Stories, the award winning Brooklyn studio; Emma Roberts, XR Producer from Australia, Sarah Ellis, director of Digital Development for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Mike Robbins, director and producer of High Road Stories studio in Berlin and John Andrew Fitzgerald, cofounder of the award-winning creative studio, Sensorium.
CPH:LAB’s project line-up deals with a wide range of stories, personal and collective, local and universal, reflecting the world at large. Focusing on the depth and variety of the immersive documentary genre, the 9 projects – bringing together 16 core participants from 15 countries– is curated to point to some of the major issues of the current and past world politics, culture, society and technology.
CPH:LAB: A great track record
Among the CPH:LAB 2022 and 2023 edition projects that have traveled the world are the Pathogen of War by director Yasmin Fedda that was selected for first public preview at Battersea Arts Centre, as part of Shubbak, the UK’s largest festival of contemporary Arab culture. Lauren Moffatt’s Local Binaries is shortlisted for the VR Art Prize by Contemporary Arts Alliance (CAA) Berlin, is the first art prize for virtual reality in the field of visual arts with an institutional exhibition in Germany. BABEL VR by ENTER.BLACK is collaborating with VEGA ARTS in Copenhagen where they have performed twice continuing their international endeavors. The CPH:LAB is co-funded by the European Union, Creative Europe MEDIA.
CPH:LAB is proud to continue its partnership with the Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio in New York. Three out of the nine selected projects – ‘The Bald Sopranos’, ‘Fully Automated Contact Zone’ and ‘Paradise Lost’ – are ONX members and will be generously supported by the Foundation for their participation at the CPH:LAB 2023/2024 programme. CPH:LAB and ONX Studio keep jointly exploring ways to expand the collaboration in terms of projects and the mentorship programme.
See a list of the nine projects and teams selected for CPH:LAB 2023/2024 below, and read more about each project at: https://cphdox.dk/lab/lab-projects/
- Follow the Carnation (Portugal / Brazil) By Catarina de Sousa, Lui Avallos, Isadora Pedro Neves Marques, Rodrigo Moreira
- Garden Alchemy (Denmark / Israel) By Michelle & Uri Kranot
- Haunted Healing (Denmark / Lebanon / France / Germany) By Maria Herholdt Engermann, Rita Martinos, Fabian Driehorst
- Hermaphrogenesis (Poland) By Marcin Gawin
- Last Evolution (Czech Republic) By Petr Salaba, Ondřej Hrách
- The Bald Sopranos (Romania / US) By Kat Mustatea, Peter Burr
- Fully Automated Contact Zone (US) By Miriam Simun
- Paradise Lost (Greece / Sweden) By Yolanda Markopoulou, Ioanna Valsamidou, Paris Mexis, Charis Lalousis, Manolis Manousakis, Michael Tebinka
- Tales of a Nomadic City (Mauritania / Denmark) By Christian Vium, Mohamed Lemine Cheikh, Kathrine Fremming, Rikke Tambo
CPH:DOX 2024 is open for film submissions. Find more information about how to apply.
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