EXCLUSIVE: Copenhagen’s festival, in new autumn dates, will show a record 226 features kicking off with Doctor Strange.

Copenhagen’s CPH PIX festival, now in its new autumn dates, has revealed a record 226 feature films in its lineup.

The 14-day festival (Oct 27 - Nov 9), which now also includes kids and family festival Buster, will show 46 features for young people in its daytime programmes and 180 films for teenagers and adults in the evenings.

As previously reported, the eighth edition of festival will open with a gala premiere of Marvel’s Doctor Strange (Mads Mikkelsen will attend).

There will be four main awards at PIX: the New Talent Grand PIX for a debut feature (with $11,200 (€10,000)); the Politiken Audience Award that comes with Danish distribution support, and the Nordisk Film Fond prizes for best children’s feature and best children’s short.

Terence Davies [pictured] will be given a full retrospective as well as showing his latest film A Quiet Passion and participating in a public talk. The PIX Talks will also include James Schamus and Amat Escalante.

The festival also presents the first European retrospective of Neil Young’s films (directed under the alias Bernard Shakey).

Special presentations will also include Mexican director Amat Escalante’s new Danish co-production The Untamed, plus Jon Nguyen’s David Lynch: The Art Life.

Festival hits in the Masters of Cinema section includes Lav Diaz’s The Woman Who Left, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey.

This year’s ‘Spot On’ directors are American’s Tim Sutton and Vietnam’s Siu Pham, who will each present three films.

Danish films

CPH PIX will present a record 12 Danish films, ranging from Ulrich Thomsen’s directorial debut In Embryo, Puk Grasten’s Kitty Genovese-inspired drama 37, and Ali Abbasi’s genre film Shelley. Three Danish films in the school programme are: Morten BH’s Anti, Frederik Barington’s When the Sun Shines and Mads Erichsen’s Where The Windmills Are. 

As usual, CPH PIX also highlights connections between music and film, presenting a focus on film music including silent classic Menschen Am Sonntag with a live performance by Icelandic band Múm. Andrew Hung from Fuck Buttons, who scored The Greasy Strangler, will perform live after that film screening. Composers Jean-Michel Jarre and Jóhann Jóhannsson will also give concerts.

There will be works-in-progress presentations for five new Nordic films, including Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson’s Under The Tree, Dome Karukoski’s Tom Of Finland, and Hlynur Pálmason’s Winter Brothers.

Other panels will be devoted to artistic courage, genre elements in arthouse films, and building sustainable models for low-budget films.

CPH PIX formerly held its festival in April, and Buster was held as a separate festival in September.

Jacob Neiiendam, festival director, told Screen: “It has been an exciting and crazily busy year for us. We have used the fact that we moved dates to a much more busy festival calendar to sharpen our focus, work on the synergies between the programmes and re-think the way we present our programme to the audience. We had a great reception of our revamped school programme, which we launched a month ago already, so I hope we will have an equal reaction to our main program now. We have retained the core DNA, our focus on new talents, auteur, arthouse and independent films, and on balancing the well-known with the brand new and wild.”

NEW TALENT GRAND PIX COMPETITION 

Aloys, dir: Tobias Nölle 

El Futuro Perfecto, dir: Nele Wohlatz 

Godless, dir: Ralitza Petrova 

Raw, dir: Julia Ducournau 

Sand Storm, dir: Elite Zexer 

Shambles, dir: Karl Lemieux 

Shelley, dir: Ali Abbasi 

Swiss Army Man, dir: Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan 

The Eremits, dir: Ronny Trocker 

The Last Family, dir: Jan P. Matuszynski 

POLITIKEN AUDIENCE AWARD NOMINEES

24 Weeks, dir: Anne Zohra Berrached 

Clair Obscur, dir: Yesim Ustaoglu 

Creative Control, dir: Benjamin Dickinson 

Parents, dir: Christian Tafdrup 

Heartstone, dir: Gudmundur A. Gudmundsson 

In the Last Days of the City, dir: Tamer El Said 

Operation Avalanche, dir: Matt Johnson 

Pericle the Black, dir: Stefano Mordini 

The 9th Life of Louis Drax, dir: Alexandre Aja 

The Giant, dir: Johannes Nyholm 

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, dir: Juho Kuosmanen 

The Wailing, dir: Na Hong-jin 

BEST CHILDREN’S FILM 

6A, dir: Peter Modestij 

Enclave, dir: Goran Radovanovic 

Girl Asleep, dir: Rosemary Myers 

The Girl, the Mother and the Demons, dir: Suzanne Osten 

Girls Lost, dir: Alexandra-Therese Keining 

Little Men, dir: Ira Sachs 

Long Way North, dir: Rémi Chayé 

Microbe & Gasoline, dir: Michel Gondry 

Mune, dir: Alexandre Heboyan, Benoît Philippon 

My Life as a Courgette, dir: Claude Barras 

NEW DANISH TALENTS 

37, dir: Puk Grasten 

Afskåret, dir: Anders Fløe 

Anti, dir: Morten BH 

Bakerman, dir: David Noel Bourke 

Copenhague - A Love Story, dir: Philippe Lesage 

The Lost Ones, dir: Dariusz Steiness 

In Embryo, dir: Ulrich Thomsen 

Needleboy, dir: Alexander Bak Sagmo 

When the Sun Shines, dir: Frederik Barington 

Where the Windmills Are, dir: Mads Erichsen 

Lovers, dir: Niels Holstein Kaa

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