Unflinching depictions of war, oppression and exile are never far away at DOK Leipzig film festival, unavoidably so given this long-running East German platform’s commitment to critical voices and politically engaged cinema. This year the harsh geopolitical reality felt even closer than usual, spilling out from the screens and onto the streets. With real-time conflict erupting in Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, the festival’s 66th edition was inevitably dominated by current global events. Even so, there was room in the richly curated program for more meditative, personal and playful cinema too, including many adventurous works that pushed the formal boundaries of both documentary and animation.
The festival opened a day after a brutal ongoing war erupted between Hamas and Israel, leaving thousands of casualties on both sides. Inevitably this inflamed highly polarised opinions on the 75-year-old conflict all across the world, including in Leipzig. The French-Palestinian film Bye Bye Tiberias, which examimes the trauma of exile on four generations of Palestinian women, told and shot beautifully by Lina Soualem, had two almost sold-out screenings at the festival. The film drew a lively crowd speaking Arabic, Hebrew, and German, who hoped for a Q&A with Soualem but sadly the director was not present.
Speaking to The Film Verdict, Soualem said she was concerned about the German premiere as news reports and police statements from other German cities confirmed a legal ban on any Palestinian solidarity protests. In Leipzig, close to the Cinemaxx complex where Bye Bye Tiberias was screened, the main train station witnessed rival pro-Palestine and pro-Isreal marches with several hundred riot police present, including cavalry and water cannon. Although both ended peacefully, there were arrests at similar demonstrations in Berlin.
As last year, war in Ukraine is still an urgent theme at DOK Leipzig. The festival’s bold choice of opening film this year was Arndt Ginzel’s The White Angel – The End of Marinka, which features heavy use of graphic GoPro footage shot by an evacuation team in Eastern Ukraine. There was also a lively panel about independent Belarusian film-makers in exile, working in resistance to a regime that has cracked down on free expression and allied itself with Putin’s invasion. These program choices felt especially bold during a time of political turbulence in Germany, when funding for Ukraine is increasingly under public scrutiny.
Indeed, provocative statements about exile and immigration were prominent across the Leipzig program. Winning the festival’s Golden Dove for best German documentary feature this year, plus three more awards, was Jonathan Schörnig’s One Hundred Four, a real-time film depicting the heroic exploits of a rescue vessel saving 104 migrants from a sinking boat in the middle of the Mediterranean sea. The timing could hardly be better for this film to be screened in Germany, and hopefully more widely across Europe. Two weeks ago, Elon Musk criticised the work of rescue ships being operated by German humanitarian groups, earning a chorus of right-wing approval, including from Germany’s populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Schörnig’s prize-winning film is a righteous rebuttal to Musk and his supporters.
DOK Leipzig’s other big Golden Dove prize-winners this year include Hovhannes Ishkhanyan’s Beauty and the Lawyer, an intimate chronicle of an LGBTQ+ couple’s fight for their rights in socially conservative Armenia, and Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies, a formally inventive investigation into historical injustice using hand-made puppets. But even in these turbulent times, the festival’s overall outlook was not all doom and gloom.
The Golden Dove for best international documentary went to Peter Mettler’s Where The Green Grass Grows, a lyrical three-hour meditation on family and memory that unfolds like a marathon mindfulness session. Darkly funny Chinese directors also had a strong year, with the best animated feature prize going to Xu Jinwei’s droll depiction of Gen Z slacker lifestyles No Changes Have Taken in Our Life, and best short film award to Bo Wang’s An Asian Ghost Story, a delightfully bizarre docu-fiction yarn about haunted Chinese wigs.
This broad spectrum is crucial to DOK Leipzig’s emotionally and politically rich appeal. While the festival never shirks its responsibility to depict the worst of human behaviour, it also finds common connections in our shared humour, compassion and creative invention. Cinema can be a bleak window on the world, but also a life-affirming force.
