Copenhagen-based DR Gross sales has snapped up worldwide rights on the anticipated opening movie of the twenty first CPH:DOX Pageant, “Life and Different Issues.” Selection debuts the trailer under.

The playful existential movie by Danish documentary filmmaker Max Kestner (“Blue Collar White Christmas,” “Amateurs in House”) is shepherded by Denmark’s Bullitt Movie (Prix Europa for “Absolute Inexperienced persons”), with Ruben Östlund’s Swedish banner Plattform Produktion and the U.Ok.’s Hopscotch Movies (“Story of Movie”). Bullitt and Plattform teamed up earlier on the 2023 Sundance particular jury prize successful doc “And the King Stated, What a Implausible Machine.”

Commenting on the DR Gross sales decide up, Kim Christiansen, government producer, in control of documentaries and co-productions, says: “Max Kestner has for many years been one of the vital clever filmmakers in Denmark, and I’ve personally been an enormous fan since his 2002 TV sequence ‘Blue Collar White Christmas,’ which in tone and humor was means forward of its time.”

“It’s a privilege to work with Max on his most interesting and sharpest movie up to now. The movie is humorous, intelligent, polemical and we hope it is going to spark debates, wherever it will likely be proven. There’s little doubt the movie will journey far,” he observes.

In “Life and Different Issues,” Kestner units out on an adventurous journey of self-discovery and existential questioning, which was sparked greater than a decade in the past by … the killing of a giraffe. Again in 2014, the capturing of the mild mammal Marius on the Copenhagen Zoo and stay post-mortem in entrance of a crowd went viral and created international outrage.

Combining philosophical reflections with a scientific vantage level from consultants corresponding to biologists Karen Lloyd, Eske Willerslev and Charles Foster, writer of the New York Instances best-seller “Being a Beast,” Kestner explores how we people understand life, our personal place within the ecosystem and connection to different species.

Going again to the “spectacular homicide thriller of the Danish giraffe Marius,” Kestner says the animal’s loss of life “is a incredible instance of how each and confused we people are relating to life, particular person lives in addition to life on the planet generally. And I share that confusion!,” he tells Selection. “Is life ruled by probability or by will for instance?,” he asks.

Reflecting on his creative endeavor and existential journey, Kestner says the largest problem was “maybe predictably” that science can not reply the large questions beforehand answered by faith, though he pays tribute to the “courageous and imaginative scientists” who “threw themselves within the deep sea of uncertainty, with care and sensitivity.”

The movie is finally “a sequence of fully unimaginable conditions the place everybody tries to assist another person – me!,” says the helmer, playfully. “You may say it’s love in motion. And in a magical means, the very try of asking these questions turns into a type of tribute to the free intelligence, how mediocre it might be for every certainly one of us,” he says.

Produced by Bullitt Movie’s founder Vibeke Vogel, “Life and Different Issues” will bow March 12 at CPH:DOX’s opening gala and can compete for the competition’s major DOX:Award.

DR Gross sales’ giant slate of premium documentaries takes within the Norwegian movie “A New Form of Wilderness,” which took residence the world cinema grand jury prize on the current Sundance Movie Pageant.

Copenhagen’s main worldwide documentary competition CPH:DOX can be operating March 12-24.