CPH: DOX Review: ‘Birita’ Touchingly Documents a Family of Artists in Flux

Outlier Projects

For his debut documentary feature, Birita, the multi-hyphenate Faroese artist Búi Dam compellingly contends with two parallel tragedies and transforms them into celebrations: Shakespeare’s King Lear and his own mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. A deeply personal work that intimately explores the nuances of family life and the unstoppable passage of time, Birita approaches its uncommonly explored subject matter with graceful sensitivity.

The director’s mother, Birita Mohr, is considered a seminal figure in Faroese theater and cinema, known for a decades-spanning career in roles in works including Antigone, The Crucible, and The Cherry Orchard. Her creative passion seeped into her community and family, influencing Dam’s path to becoming an artist. After being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2011, Mohr chose to retire from her stage career, with her condition declining over the years, as Dam puts it, “she can’t express what she thinks and feels.” Mohr is cared for by her husband and Dam’s father, a retired theater director, but over time, this becomes increasingly challenging, leading the two men to consider placing her in an assisted living community.

While his own wife prepares to give birth, Dam decides to direct a production of King Lear, with Mohr playing the eponymous character, a move that would mark his mother’s great return to the stage since her diagnosis. Birita documents this moving creative process, one that offers Mohr the chance to reunite with her lifelong infatuation with performance, while also allowing the filmmaker to give something back to his mother that would conventionally seem unattainable. As ethical questions arise around Mohr’s leading role in the production, whether it is truly consensual decision-making, Birita captures the experimental methodologies that will allow Mohr to take part.

Outlier Projects

Despite the isolation of its Faroe Islands setting, Dam instills in Birita a sense of closeness that clearly reflects his own family’s deep ties to the creative community there. At the beautiful wood-panelled theater where they rehearse and perform, the entire production team behind King Lear seems banded around Mohr’s success. The director and his collaborators intriguingly choose a strategy in which Mohr’s lines will be recited by her husband, who will shadow her on stage, since her condition prevents her from retaining the long passages of Shakespearean dialogue. Despite this unorthodox method, it still allows Mohr’s roots in physical performance (which included a stint as a clown, revisited in archival footage) to shine through.

While Alzheimer’s still feels so mysterious to the masses (myself included), the documentary is most heartening in its transparency about how grateful Mohr is to be reunited with her craft. Mohr may not recognize herself or her family in old photos, but when she returns to the makeup chair, the passion swiftly returns, dredging up forgotten spirits and emotions that serve as Birita’s most impactful moment. These junctures of clear bliss ground the work in a tonally optimistic perspective, despite being largely structured around the limitations imposed by a disease many find indomitable.

Through its gentle cadence, circular design, and focus on the intricacies of family ties, Dam’s efforts with Birita make it feel akin to another filmmaker of the North Atlantic, the Icelandic Hlynur Pálmason (Godland, The Love That Remains), a comparison meant to be complimentary in every way, as both of these directors seem highly attuned to capturing the rhythms of life as they truly exist. At its essence, Birita operates as a love letter to Dam’s mother and her career, and to the mothers who continue to shape his world.

4/5

Faroe Islands / 2026 / World Premiere / 90 min / Faroese with English Subtitles

‘Birita’ made its World Premiere in the Nordic: Dox Competition at CPH: DOX on March 15. Visit the documentary’s website.