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"Having peppered their program with fiction films since their first edition in 2003 – a time when doing such a thing was far less commonplace than it is now – Copenhagen’s non-fiction film festival CPH:DOX has long held a reputation for eschewing categorisation. This is most apparent in the NEW:VISION competition, a section designed to dismantle divisions between classifications of “artist” and “documentarían” and instead encourage convergences of these approaches. With works by makers as varied as Ben Rivers, Deborah Stratman, Zhou Chen, Rosa Barba, Yto Barrada, Basim Magdy and Tsai Ming-liang present in recent years, the section has had serious pedigree for a while, acting as a well regarded platform for outlier (and often peculiar) artists’ film operating in a non-fiction mode, or documentary work that could sit as comfortably in a gallery. This year’s competition – far from the festival’s strongest – perhaps displays the increasing popularity of this sort of boundary-blurring work, but also the pressures that this puts on programmers competing to source and select it."
Full review of the entire NEW:VISIONS strand up on Senses of Cinema 87