Swedish director Nathan Grossman premiered his latest documentary, Beyond the Lens, at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX) on March 8, 2026. The film follows Grossman's collaboration with the Korubo community in the Brazilian Amazon as he turns the camera back on the legacy of colonial representation.
What Grossman's film says about the Western gaze
The central tension of the work is the pull between visual efficiency—capturing striking images quickly—and ethical safety, allowing Indigenous participants to dictate how they appear. Grossman lingered, hand hovering over the camera, before deciding to let a Korubo elder choose the framing; that pause reframes authority from director‑to‑subject.
A tactile visual language
Shot on 35 mm celluloid, the grain of the film mirrors the texture of rainforest bark, while the ambient sound of distant howler monkeys punctuates each scene. This material choice roots the documentary in a sensory reality that digital crispness would erase.
Beyond its aesthetic, the film participates in a broader decolonising wave that has been reshaping documentary practice since the early 2020s, insisting that stories emerge from the communities that live them. By foregrounding the Korubo's own narrative strategies, Grossman challenges the entrenched visual hierarchy that still privileges Western interpretation.
It matters because it confronts the visual conventions that sustain colonial power structures in global media.
When the final reel ended, the audience heard the soft rustle of the canopy outside the screening room—a reminder that the film's subjects remain beyond the theater's walls, continuing their lives independent of any frame.
In the months ahead, the documentary will travel to festivals in Berlin and Toronto, extending the conversation about who gets to look and who is looked at.
Grossman's effort signals a shift toward shared authorship in visual culture, a modest but decisive step toward more equitable storytelling.
In a world saturated with images, moments of restraint become acts of resistance.
