The streets are paved with culture in Leipzig, the ghosts of history ever present. The birthplace of Liebniz, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Bach and Wagner – not to mention Till Lindemann of pyrotechnic operatic shock-rockers Rammstein, that most Wagnerian of contemporary bands – also hosts East Germany’s longest-running independent film festival, known since 2005 as DOK Leipzig.
Founded under the old DDR Communist regime in 1955, only to be banned several times for failing to follow the party line, this long-running event remains a forum for free-thinking and critical voices even today. As a platform for both documentary and animation, the festival has a strong industry and business focus, but the 65th edition also offered a lively mix of parties and premieres, sparky debates and arty sidebars.
For attendees, DOK Leipzig still retains an indie-leaning, close-knit, communal feel. The cosy Passage Kino cinema, tucked away in an unassuming arcade alleyway close to the city’s handsome historic centre, has long served as the main screening hub. But the festival also enjoys financial support from both city and regional governments, which allows it to make a visible splash across a much wider urban canvas, including some of Leipzig’s grandest buildings. The main meeting lounge and more arty sidebar programs are located in the Museum of Fine Arts, a mighty modernist cathedral of glass and steel squeezed between cobbled streets and chocolate-box townhouses.
Free public screenings also take place in one of the cavernous entrance foyers to Leipzig’s palatial railway station, the largest in Europe and a mini-city in its own right, a gloriously surreal venue to watch films as commuters and shoppers shuffle past. The festival’s main party and prize-giving events, meanwhile, mostly take place in the city’s bohemian western suburbs at the Schaubühne Lindenfels, a soulfully shabby-chic music-hall with an elegantly crumbling interior.
As befits a politically engaged festival that managed to outlast a repressive Communist regime, held in a city famous for peaceful street protests that signalled the first cracks in the Berlin Wall, critical angles on modern-day totalitarian states were high on the agenda in this year’s program. Ukraine has featured heavily at numerous film gatherings all this year, for obvious reasons, but DOK Leipzig went the extra mile by screening a fest-in-exile version of DocuDays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, which was due to take place in Kyiv in March before Russia’s barbarian invasion.
Ukrainian film-makers and themes figured prominently in the Leipzig program, while the main Golden Dove Audience Award went to Maksym Melnyk’s Three Women, a charmingly sweet multi-character study focussed on a small rural village in western Ukraine. In his opening statement, festival director Christoph Terhechte reaffirmed solidarity not just with Ukrainians but also with “the courageous women in Iran and all those who finally have the prospect of shaking off decades of oppression and asserting elementary human rights. DOK Leipzig, too, stands for these values.”
Queer lives under pressure was another recurring motif at DOK Leipzig this year. The main Golden Dove prize in the International Competition went to Colombian Theo Montoya’s meta-docu-drama ghost story Anhell69, a moving and original screen memorial to Medellín’s doomed outsider kids. And top prize for short documentary was awarded to Will You Look At Me by Shuli Huang, a compact but poetic vignette about the director coming out to his family.
The Silver Dove award in the International Competition was won by A Life Like Any Other by Faustine Cros, which interrogates the director’s own parental history using her father’s obsessive home video collection, subversively reclaiming her depressive mother’s untold back story from the official family narrative of sunny domestic contentment. This kind of critical, highly personal, archive-driven film was a major feature at DOK Leipzig, with world premieres like Sofia Brockenshire’s The Dependents, Mickaël Bandela’s One Mother and Brenda Akele Jorde’s The Homes We Carry. All these films have their own unique stories to tell about race and class, exile and belonging, but all share a theme of children digging away at unresolved tensions with their parents using family video clips, vintage photos and new interview material in fresh and inventive ways.
Beyond the main screening program, one of the festival’s stand-out bespoke events this year was Dancing In The Dark by Hysteresis and Company, a multi-media performance-film project from director Robert Seidel which combined modern dance, digital graphics and live-action footage projected instantaneously onto the concave rear walls of the Schaubühne Lindenfels, all set to a crackling electronic score by German composer Markus Popp, aka Oval. Hybrid happenings like these reinforced the sense of DOK Leipzig as a kind of experimental laboratory for pushing the limits of both documentary and animation to new frontiers. A small festival with deep roots and impressively grand ambitions.
