Following subdued years during the pandemic, DokLeipzig is one festival that has emphatically rebounded. Indeed, this 67thedition of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animation (October 28-November 3, 2024) witnessed unprecedented attendance, selling a record-breaking 55,000 tickets and drawing well over 2,000 accredited industry professionals to one of Germany’s most historically rich cities. Particularly heartening about this renewed enthusiasm for cinema were the cross-generational demographics, with students, seniors, industry delegates and everyone in between queued up in long lines clutching phones or paper tickets to enter festival screenings often sold out days in advance at venues peppered across the city center.
Founded in 1955 as the first independent film festival in East Germany, a few short years following the 1951 launch of the Berlin International Film Festival, DokLeipzig is also the world’s oldest documentary festival. It continues to center documentary and animation from formerly and currently socialist countries as well as international work grappling with questions of social and political concern. History’s recursivity was one motif binding this year’s showcase, exploring pressing issues such as war and its long-term effects, the Cold War and GDR history, decolonization, migration and refugees, climate change, gender, coming of age, education, and aging and death. With 3,300 titles submitted, the competition rose by 15% over the past year, and 209 films and XR from 55 countries secured a spot in the program. Artistic Director Christoph Terhechte, who directed the Berlinale Forum for 17 years, was a ubiquitous presence, nimbly moderating countless post-screening discussions and serving as polyglot translator for international guests.
Opening night featured the world premiere of Tracing Light, guaranteed to delight cinéastes and cinephiles across the bounds of language and culture with its both artful and scientific exploration of light’s quantum properties. Shooting and editing his own films, director Thomas Reidelsheimer first began exploring the building blocks of moving images with the award-winning Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie, which previously opened Dok Leipzig 2004. That project profiled deaf Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who relies on tactility and a capacity to feel sound rather than listen with her ears. It was followed by Leaning on the Wind (2017), which explores the relationship between nature and time via land artist Andy Goldsworthy. By contrast, the trilogy’s third installment ‘scatters’ its focus across multiple scientists and artists. Conversations at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen and at Glasgow University’s Extreme Light Group reveal the challenges inherent to measuring and quantifying light. As both particle and wave, the beams disperse along pathways exceedingly difficult to retrace because light follows the Heisenberg principle, meaning it is influenced by observation, making objective measurement virtually impossible – a dilemma familiar to documentary filmmakers seeking proximity to their subject while upholding some measure of objectivity.
In the German competition, the Golden Dove for best feature was awarded to the German-Swiss coproduction Tarantism Revisited, which examines an ecstatic movement form practised since the 17th-century in the region of Apulia, Italy. According to folklore, the women overcome by these seizure-like movements, or taranta, are responding to the bite of tarantulas; yet over the centuries, these convulsions came to be understood as a form of socially sanctioned expurgation of anxieties, frustrations, and possibly of trauma. Historical footage shot in the 1950s by anthropologists and ethnographers captures the writhing, tortured paroxysms of the afflicted, while clerics, family members, and villagers stand by to ensure the ‘tarantata’ don’t injure themselves; this is overlaid by voice-over of excerpted interviews also recorded in the earlier era, along and interwoven with more recent commentary by cultural historians and local villagers. Anja Dreschke and Michaele Schäuble also include a young woman, whose self-proclaimed mission of ‘re-enacting’ for contemporary Apurians the taranta’s earlier function appears to signal that modern societal maladies also call for expurgation, albeit via the simulacrum-cum-spectacle, one that some eyewitnesses appear to honor as mythologized ritual, while other passersby merely pause to idly stare before drifting onward to more pressing pursuits.
The world premiere of Dominique Cabrera’s La Jetée, the Fifth Shot secured the Golden Dove in the international competition for her brilliant reconstruction of a cousin’s re-encounter with a conjunctural moment in his familial past and in French decolonial history. It was precipitated by his attendance at a Cinematheque Française screening of Chris Marker’s experimental 29-minute film, La Jettée (1962). Jean-Henri Bertrand, a pied-noir like Cabrera herself, believed he recognized himself in that film’s ‘fifth shot’, in which a couple and their young son stand on Orly airport’s outdoor viewing pier with their backs to the camera as they watch planes landing on the Tarmac to deliver new arrivals –in that year, especially from Algeria. Hovering over the enlarged still at an editing/viewing table in a dimly lit room, the two cousins speculate over the visible evidence, also digging up family photos in which Bertrand’s parents are similarly positioned with their backs to the camera and comparing body shapes, facial profiles, and hair. The plot takes a melodramatic turn when they learn from another relative that Marker’s actor, Davos Hanich, whom closer scrutiny of a film still reveals bears striking resemblance to the adult Jean-Henri, was raised in the same Algerian village of Sig and may have been romantically involved with a member of Jean-Henri’s family.
Jean-Henri’s recognition of an earlier version of himself echoes the epiphany at the close Marker’s The Jetty, when the protagonist realizes that a photographically emblazoned memory of witnessing another man’s sudden death by assassination on the Orly platform is actually a scene from his own immanent death. Deft editing by Sophie Brunet and Dominique Barbier similarly enables time travel in Cabrera’s project along overlapping currents of history – those of film, family, and decolonizing nation – in a documentary whose speculative premise will delight film scholars, especially Marker fans. Its layers of historical recursivity were sealed when Cabrera’s achievement was awarded Leipzig’s Golden Dove some 60 years following the award of the same to Marker’s verité-stye Le joli Mai (1963), which was shot parallel to La Jetée to capture the eerie peace on Paris streets following the Évian Accords.
Highlights from Cabrera’s filmography also screened in the retrospective section, each bearing her characteristically empathetic approach to human subjects and their milieux. The notable 2023 documentary Bonjour Monsieur Comolli was filmed at the home of director, writer and former journal editor of Cahiers du Cinéma Jean-Louis Comolli in the final months prior to his death of terminal cancer. Cabrera and journalist/scholar Isabelle Le Corff navigate Comolli’s Paris apartment as old friends, conversing with the frail yet mentally agile mentor and icon of French cinema culture on everything from life, love, cinema, and death… to wine (this is France after all). Both Cabrera and animation artist Isabel Herguera, also featured in the retrospective, attended audience discussions and each offered a master class in halls packed with film students and curious publics to explore how a film practice evolves and matures across a career.
Also posthumously celebrated was the uncompromising oeuvre of East German filmmaker Thomas Heise (1955-2024), chronicler of intertwined East and West German histories, pre- and post-unification. These screenings sold out early, speaking to the hunger among most especially the national population to come to terms with a past remediated under Heise’s honest and unflinching gaze. Included were Baruschke, a portrait of a spy who worked for the secret services of both East and West Germany, and Iron Age, which tracks the fates of young people in the formerly vital industrial city of Eisenhüttenstadt, and the only two films produced with the state production company DEFA, Volkspolizei (1985) and Imbiß Spezial (1990). Heise’s final magnus opus, Heimat is a Space in Time (2019), disinters a family archive of photographs, letters, and other realia across 100 years of German and Austrian history. Heise’s impassive voiceover accompanies the 218-minute visual montage, reading aloud excerpts from epistolary exchanges penned in an era when letters were so packed with confessional content, philosophical musing, and historical and political commentary as to comprise an evidentiary chronicle of their own. Feelings shared there come alive in the listener’s imagination in a trance-like reverie amid a visual succession of family photographs, architectural sites, contemporary landscapes, and tracking shots of fields, roads and highways. This epic film drew the festival audience into a parallel dimension, where the affects attending personal and political conflicts across past turbulent epochs unfurled within us as by osmotic transmission. We returned hours later, transformed, and disoriented to find ourselves seated in a still fully-packed theatre in Leipzig’s Passage-Kino. Rounding out this festival homage was an “Evening of Remembrance,” where friends and colleagues –following Heise’s lead –- had assembled a composite image of his life through material fragments, remembered conversations, and screen images.
Another retrospective, Third Ways in a Divided World, gained its title as belated forum for films that didn’t make it to Leipzig during the Cold war on account of controversial content, here organized into themes pertaining to Cuba, anti-colonialism, experimental political films, among others, and including a section devoted to the enduring Palestinian/Israel conflict. Edna Politi’s 1973 West German DFFB student film, For the Palestinians blends everyday observations with facts and statistics to convey grounds for Palestinians’ push back on economic and political disenfranchisement, while Aida (1985), Marwan Salamah’s portrait of an educator in a PLO orphanage in Tunis, was shot while a PLO delegate studying at Babelsberg. These complement two further portraits in the 2024 competition. In There Was Nothing Here Before, Yvann Yagchi, who was raised in Switzerland by diasporic Palestinian parents, reflects on his return visit to Palestine and the failed effort to reconnect with his Jewish best friend from childhood, who had since moved to a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. I Shall Not Hate references the eponymous 2010 memoir by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, for which he was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize. Abuelaish was raised in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, studied medicine abroad, and became the first Palestinian to receive a staff position as infertility specialist in an Israeli hospital. The documentary includes footage from 2009, when three of Dr. Abueliash’s daughters were killed by an Israeli tank in Gaza months following his wife’s death of cancer, but the focus is on recent interviews conducted in Toronto, where he moved with his remaining children to build a new life as doctor and professor. He reflects on past and present devastation and elaborates why forgiveness offered him the only viable path to continue embracing life.
Against the backdrop of geopolitical tensions looming large during this year’s DokLeipzig, among them the immanent US presidential elections, warfare in multiple regions, and stymied climate talks, many festival films offered visual evidence that social activism and personal engagement remains alive, producing counter narratives to slick market-driven storytelling and (dis)information pervading global media cultures. It therefore made complete sense that the Audience Competition’s Golden Dove went to the feature Once Upon a Time in a Forest for tracking a cohort of young climate activists as they prepare their pacifist protests in Finland’s forests otherwise targeted to fuel the lumber industry. Particularly noteworthy was the close-knit fellowship among the activists, including their commitment to respectful and thoughtful modes of negotiation with one another when preparing their strategies, but also when engaging corporate managers and politicians in small communities where interdependence still ensures a degree of cohesion and accountability otherwise absent in global negotiations over trade, commerce, and environmental policy. As in several festival films, I was struck by the importance of, and need for, mutual respect in intergenerational dialogue for what all vested parties can bring to the table, whether wisdom of experience or the vitality and new knowledges of youth, especially in this era of reckoning when all hands are needed on deck and everyone deserves a seat at the table. Sustainability in our relationship to the forest as living entity is vividly foregrounded, not least through the lush Finnish evergreens palpable even across the ‘fourth wall,’ but these young people also show us a path towards sustainable human relationality.
Intergenerational dialogue and transfer of knowledge and wisdom were also thematized in several education documentaries, including long-standing documentarian Claire Simon’s Elementary, and artist and filmmaker Heidrun Holzfeind’s An Octopus Has Destroyed the Moon, whose content has no connection to cephalopods. Both Simon’s examination of a primary school in Ivry-sur-Seine on the southeastern outskirts of Paris, and Holzfeind’s portrait of the pre-vocational August Sander school in Friedrichshain, East Berlin, bring into focus small vocal and gestural inflections of care imparted by educators to those under their tutelage even amid harried work days and full lesson plans. With modest means amid the daily rehearsal of tasks and verbal instructions delivered for the umpteenth time, instructors engage the young charges in their multicultural classrooms in joint choreographies that elicit alternating moments of insecurity and triumph in counterpoint with their teachers’ own modulations between firm discipline and kind counsel.
Daniel Abma’s The Family Approach earned the ver.di Prize for Solidarity, Humanity, and Fairness, sponsored by Germany’s second largest trade union ver.di. Over several years, this Dutch filmmaker followed a German youth housing group and the professional social workers and educators who step in when parents are unable or unwilling to fulfill their responsibilities. These staff ensure some measure of continuity extending beyond pragmatic assistance to an ethics of care, offering young boys security, moral orientation and a sense of belonging. Editing and choice of footage aid the viewer in grasping the complexities and contradictions the youth welfare system must navigate, as when the camera observes disorientation register on a boy’s face after he brightly inquire of his mother on the phone when she’ll come visit the foster home, and the evasive response audible on the speaker phone is, “um, not this month,” followed by the lame explanation, “I don’t have any time.” For jeopardized children, the key ingredient of individual affection and personal commitment evidenced in the unwavering presence of social workers can make all the difference. This content found strong resonance among inmates at the penitentiary Regis-Breitingen, where DokLeipzig annually screens a film selected by a jury of inmates, ever since an art therapist suggested the initiative “DOK in Prison” back in 2016. A commitment to the next generation was also evidenced in DokLeipzig’s outreach to schools, holding two dedicated screenings at Leipzig’s Cinestar of, respectively, The Family Approach and The Vagabond’s Garden. In the latter brilliant thesis film, Babelsberg graduate Anna Friedrich elected to accompany for a portion of a calendar year four different women who have embraced the nomadic life, whether via hitchhiking or their own camper wagon. The German title Lichter der Strasse plays off the luminous personalities of these plucky, resourceful, and surprisingly happy women who model for spectators and the German society they navigate alternative ways of being in and engaging both the natural world and patriarchal spaces and places.
Women’s resilience posed another red thread this year, discernible across disparate cultures and aesthetic modes of storytelling partaking of character-driven approaches to political and social issue. Two films from Ukraine also broke through age barriers to foreground vitality and resilience among women over 50. Adelina Borets’ debut feature Flowers of Ukraine reveals the daily challenges faced by Natalia, a feisty grandmother who stubbornly refuses to surrender her rustic house and surrounding lush gardens and trees to predatory land speculators, even as Kyiv’s modern high-rise condo towers loom just beyond her extensive vegetable plot, chicken coop, and garden shed. Although she fields the ongoing intimidation tactics and eviction threats with ribald humor and a seasoned hand, the potential for a Russian invasion looms immanent as an even more destructive stealth force. Mariia Ponomarova’s Nice Ladies shadows the eponymous team of 12 women age 38 to 73 who train twice weekly in a Kharkiv sports hall for the European Cheerleading Championship in the “25+ category.” As the Russians begin bombing their city, the women take solace in their rehearsals, a reprieve also from private worries and burdens, be they the double shift of job and housework, economic austerity, or the death of family members in war. Preparing for the 30-hour self-financed westward bus journey to the Championships, they ponder their team’s chances in light of their ages, and whether their friendships will someday divide among those who remain in Ukraine and those who choose to leave.
In the animation section, Lászlo Csáki’s Pelikan Blue secured the Golden Dove for its novel revisitation of the early 1990s, when residents of eastern European countries gained newfound access to the West, yet lacked the financial means to travel. Via audio voiceover, three Hungarian men laconically recount their entrepreneurial venture, in which they appropriated the means of production by forging their own official train tickets, at that time still handwritten on carbon copy, using sanitizer to bleach the carbon ink to a veritable ‘pelican blue,’ iron it flat, adding an official stamp, and studying railway timetables, prices and routes to complete the forms. The animated reenactment draws on evidentiary techniques such as close-ups of the material process entailed in operations whose success emboldened the forgers to share the wealth, producing over 1,000 tickets for others---at least until the authorities got wind.
Complementing festival screenings were several Dok Talks on changing definitions of the political in documentary, the use of archival material in animation, and the discussion, “The University Job – Ordeal or Jackpot?” Industry professionals benefited from workshops exploring the eroding distinction between documentary and fiction, previewed films from 21 countries for distribution in the Generation Africa 2.0 project amplifying regional voices and actions in the climate crisis, and many other topics now available on most podcast platforms. Those needing a break from hours of sitting could wander through Fluxusopolis, a series of installations distributed across city venues, including the Museum of Applied Arts, the Cinematheque, and even Leipzig’s Hauptbahnhof, considered among Europe’s most elegant historic train stations, where travelers with an idle hour to fill between transfers could wander in and reflect on the installation’s titular premise of “the city of change.” Fluxusopolis posits technology can empower us to imagine alternatives to present existence that could pose a new path forward. Innovation in Extended Reality (XR) was richly in evidence and made available to the public through exhibits that included 360-degree films, games, interactive docs, and augmented reality experiences that redefine our relationship to motion and scale.