"1989" opens CPH:DOX 2014

When CPH:DOX kicks off this year's edition in Copenhagen with the world premiere of Anders Østeraard's "1989", audiences in other parts of Denmark and Europe will also be able to experience Østergaard's film about the fall of the iron curtain.

For the first time in the festival's history, the opening film will be screened simultaneously in a number of Danish cinemas as well as in more than 15 theatres across Europe, including in Oslo, Prague, Brussels, Dublin, Kiev, Helsinki, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Porto and Belgrade.

About "1989"

Anders Østergaard's film is an investigative look at the year the Berlin Wall fell, documenting the events that took place in Hungary as a prelude to the dramatic changes in November 1989. The director recreates the events and leads the audiences deep into the politicians' secret meeting rooms by using a mix of interviews, archive material and reconstructed scenes and dialogues. Watch trailer below:

DOX:AWARD 2014 – see more

"1989" is also in the line-up for the main award, and so is Joshua Oppenheimer's Danish-produced "The Look of Silence", which won the Grand Prix in September at Venice Film Festival.

See the list so far of films nominated for the DOX:AWARD 2014 at cphdox.dk and sample them in the trailer here:

CPH:DOX / 6-16 November 2014

The Look of Silence

Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014

Through Joshua Oppenheimer's footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.

1989

Anders Østergaard, Erzsébet Rácz, 2014

"1989" is a high-politics drama about the collapse of the Iron Curtain. In 1988, to save Hungary's appalling economy, the young technocrat Miklós Neméth becomes the country's new prime minister. He decides to remove the expensive border control apparatus from the state budget.