The Non-Neutral Gaze – A Study of Gaze and Positioning in Danish Documentary Film

Through the research development project “The Non-Neutral Gaze”, filmmakers Ánitá Beikpour and Taekyung Tanja In Wol aim to explore gaze and positioning in Danish documentary film.

Through this research development project, we aim to engage with the “sacred” in Danish documentary film tradition and examine how various gazes come to define our shared film history, and what significance this has for the films being produced today.

The aim of the project is to critically and historically examine the gaze in Danish documentary film and to develop teaching practices through this. Drawing on our own and others’ works, and by delving into the Danish documentary film tradition, we will examine how gaze, positioning and power relations play out on film, and how this can be developed into a practical-artistic subject at The National Film School of Denmark.

Ánitá Beikpour and Taekyung Tanja In Wol Sørensen

Taekyung Tanja In Wol Sørensen is a director and visual anthropologist. For her documentary ‘A Colombian Family’ (’80), she received an honourable mention for Emerging International Filmmaker at HOTDOCS 2020. Tanja is currently in production with the documentary “SLÆGT/Homesick”, for which she was selected for the Berlinale Talents Doc Station in 2024. In her film work, she explores how power structures such as war, the nation state and the neo-colonial era are experienced and expressed through individuals and communities, particularly within the family. Alongside Ánitá, Taekyung Tanja In Wol is a co-founder of The Union, and has many years of research and teaching experience at institutions including the University of Copenhagen and The National Film School of Denmark.

Ánitá Beikpour graduated as a documentary director from the National Film School of Denmark in 2017. She works with fiction, documentary film and video art, and made her debut at CPH:DOX with the documentary film ‘Prelle – Listening to Myself’ in 2020. Ánitá often explores personal and political themes in her films, such as personal freedom, rebellion and homesickness. She has worked in various art collectives, such as FCNN (Feminist Collective With No Name), which has exhibited at the Berlin Biennale, amongst other venues, and she is a co-founder of The Union – a cultural workers’ union aiming to foster a critical anti-racist discourse within the arts and culture sector in Denmark. In addition, Ánitá has been teaching as a guest lecturer at The National Film School of Denmark for the past few years.