DOK Leipzig 2024: The Verdict
The long-running East German documentary and animation festival found a fruitful balance this year between heavy political themes and more playful, experimental, mind-bending films.
Leipzig 2024
Tarantism Revisited
Visual anthropologists Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble investigate the mysterious rituals of taranatism in this arty, lightly experimental, prize-winning essay-film.
DOK Leipzig: The Awards
Dominique Cabrera’s feature documentary ‘La jetée: the Fifth Shot’ triumphed in the feature documentary category at Dok Leipzig, while László Csáki’s ‘Pelikan Blue’ swept the animation strand.
Flowers of Ukraine
A free-spirited urban nature lover becomes a living symbol of Ukrainian resistance in ‘Flowers of Ukraine,’ a slender but immensely charming debut feature by Adelina Borets.
The Battle for Laikipia
Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murimi’s essential documentary ‘The Battle for Laikipia’ describes global warming and the brutal impact of colonial land ownership in Kenya, showing the overlap of environmental and social issues without oversimplifying.
There Was Nothing Here Before
Yvann Yagchi’s documentary ‘There Was Nothing Here Before’ is as an angry yet tender letter to a lost friend, amid a brave quest to discover the filmmaker’s family history in the occupied territories.
La Jetée, the Fifth Shot
Director Dominique Cabrera’s investigation of her family connections to Chris Marker’s landmark sci-fi film ‘La Jetée’ takes a messy but sporadically magical mystery tour though history, memory, cinema and politics.
Morichales
Chris Gude’s vivid doc on the ravages and inequalities of ages-long gold mining in Venezuela is startling in its poetry and meticulous in its contextualisation.
Wishing on a Star
A playful, lighthearted hybrid doc from Peter Kerekes on steering one’s fate, as an Italian astrologer sends her troubled clients off globetrotting.
Tracing Light
Thomas Riedelsheimer brings land artists and physicists together in a considered, densely packed doc celebrating the elusive nature of light as a medium.
DOK Leipzig festival serves up an autumnal feast of documentaries, animation and innovation.
The 67th edition of DOK Leipzig festival promises a week of pop and politics, critical debate and constructive disagreement in fiercely divided times.
Marching in the Dark
A quietly angry film about suicidal Indian farmers and the women they leave behind, documentary director Kinshuk Surjan’s feature debut ‘Marching in the Dark’ is moving, lyrical and surprisingly uplifting.
A Year in the Life of the Country
Tomasz Wolski’s found-footage documentary ‘A Year in the Life of the Country’ paints a playful, freewheeling collage portrait of Communist Poland during martial law and the birth of Solidarity.
Blueberry Dreams
Elene Mikaberidze’s wry, sensitively humane and politically layered debut doc explores precarity on Georgia’s border via one family’s blueberry farm venture.