Leipzig 2024

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.

Visual anthropologists Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble investigate the mysterious rituals of taranatism in this arty, lightly experimental, prize-winning essay-film.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In her fascinating and visually dazzling debut feature ‘Balomania’, documentary maker Sissel Morell Dargis embeds herself in Brazil’s secretive underground subculture of illegal hot air balloon gangs.