Copenhagen is bigger than it looks, depending on what you’re after.

Which is my way of copping out of not having gotten more done today.

I’m sooo looking forward to the VR content this year. It’s broken down into simplistic, but useful categories, and all of it looks fascinating.

The first bit of the day was spent at the Propellor lab: a genuine movement towards finding new strategies for delivering content to audiences, from the production stages all the way to that after-sex cigarette stage of “wow, that was amazing(or a let down).

Led by Daniel Johnsen and Erwin M. Schmidt, the format is fast and loose. And demanding. If you’re a participant or observer there’s no holding back. You have to tell everyone your idea for a business model so that your peers can tell you everything that’s right / wrong about your it, and make it better.

The pace is fast, and it seems like everyone is digging deep in their guts, to quickly pull out what’s most important. Will that bring out everyone’s best? Tomorrow will tell.

The pitches, atThe Rainmaking Loft Copenhagen On Sunday, are open to all. If you’re interested in the thinking that’s drawing us forward, or want to pull that apart, be there!

Everyday life feels pretty complicated. Until you watch lifeless infants being pulled from mountains of rubble. Feras Fayyad‘s Last men in Aleppo drives a dagger into your heart over and over, making you hope for numbness, so you don’t have to feel the hurt so much anymore.

There are lots of Syria projects around right now; documentary, VR, journalistic and otherwise. But I can’t think of another that made me feel quite so much the “normalcy” of war and death. The “white helmets” whose job it is to save people drowned in the fallout from bombs are just people, like the mechanic you used to work with or the teenager who used to bug you by whipping a hockey puck into your garden or the guy who used to be your pharmacist. Stuck in extraordinary circumstances and determined to do right by their city, by their neighbors, by their own consciences, they don the iconic white helmets of Syria’s saviors and hurl themselves into the most dangerous situations imaginable, on the outside chance that a miracle will happen, and one of the people they can actually save someone. As a Syrian, it makes me ashamed for not being one of those white helmet guys.

Collaborator Steen Johannessen was at yesterday’s screening, while Fayyad was attending a premiere in Switzerland.

“We had a little over 200 hours of footage to go through, plus a huge amount of broadcast archive. There are a million Syrian stories to tell, and every decision was measured. This story is important because it brings us into the day to day reality of the people left behind. Abandoned.”

Not for the feint of heart, but required viewing for anyone who feels the shameful abandonment of an entire people by the international community. Rightful winner of the grand jury prize at Sundance.

Craigslist Allstars is a whole different kind of beast.

Filmmaker Samira Elagoz made the film as her thesis project, and it got enough attention to get played at the fest. She posted an ad in Craiglist hoping to be invited into strangers’ homes, and document their encounters. I suppose the kink should have been obvious, but I was more interested in the DIY approach of setting up the concept and being invited inside someone’s personal space.

“The sex, in hindsight, was probably the most likely outcome. But that wasn’t why I started making the film. But not a single woman answered my ad, and the men.. are men.”

Two screenings left at the fest. If you want to peel back some of those mysterious doorways, check it out.