Mistaken Identity

SEEING, ACTUALLY SEEING ANOTHER PERSON, TURNS OUT to be immensely difficult. It’s not just a matter of optics, but also of culture, and history, and fear, and other factors that tend to warp perception. Women, in particular and especially, still rarely are seen without filters of bias, stereotyping, assumptions, fantasy, fear, willful subjugation. As both humans and viewers, moviegoers are left needing to unsee what’s not there, even just to start. In several particularly mindful recent works of nonfiction shown at this year’s CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen, filmmakers sought to see and represent individual women with clarity and honesty—in certain respects radically so.

In the purposefully methodical and implicitly somber director Alina Rudnitskaya spent nearly a decade shadowing three women she originally met at a cynical clinic that taught feminine seduction techniques (captured in her astonishing 2009 short film ). In theory, by following