The end of a lively week in Leipzig, where the 67th edition of the world’s oldest documentary festival is currently winding up for another year. The official prize-giving ceremony may be over, but the aftershow party is not quite finished yet. A few final screenings and unofficial celebrations are still scattered across the handsome imperial palaces, grand halls, theatres and bars of this culturally and historically rich East German city.
DOK Leipzig, the more widely used abbreviation of International Leipzig Film Week for Documentary and Animation Film, is always a politically and intellectually engaging event, especially in times of heightened conflict, as non-fiction films carry an extra obligation to put world events under critical scrutiny. This year’s program had timely films about ongoing conflicts in Israel and Gaza, Ukraine and Georgia. But even the most puritanical documentary nerd needs more than one colour in the rainbow, and thankfully the festival was also rich in personal stories, experimental artworks, quirky animations and playful passion projects.
One of the festival’s highest prizes, The Golden Dove for Best International Documentary, went to French director Dominique Cabrera for her unorthodox memoir film La Jetée, the Fifth Shot. Tracing Cabrera’s unlikely family connections to Chris Marker’s celebrated experimental sci-fi short La Jetée (1962), this was a perfect DOK Leipzig winner: a documentary about a documentary, but also about unreliable memory, post-colonial politics and the elusive search for cinematic truth. The Golden Dove for Best German Documentary, meanwhile, was awarded to Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble for Tarantism Revisited, a fascinating deep-dive study of tarantism, a blend of ecstatic dancing and religious ritual rooted in the folklore of southern Italy. Both films are Leipzig world premieres, and should go on to wider festival play.
Picking up the Golden Dove for Best Animated Feature was Hungarian director László Csáki’s Pelikan Blue, a genial blend of lo-fi 2D graphics and non-fiction audio interviews recalling a boom time in the early 1990s, when Soviet Communism had just collapsed and foreign rail travel suddenly opened up for citizens of the former Eastern Bloc nations. But train journeys were not cheap, so an enterprising gang of young Hungarians figured out a cheeky scheme to forge the hand-written tickets of the time, initially enjoying limitless travel across Europe, then running a lucrative illegal business. This slight but entertaining throwback to more innocent times has also been shortlisted for the European Film Awards on December 7.
Across the wider Leipzig program this year were multiple films that addressed Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. They came from different eras and voices, all attempting to convey what it means to be Palestinian after 1948, whether living in the diaspora, being Palestinian with an Israeli passport, residing in a refugee camp in Syria, stranded in a West Bank village, or raised in a PLO orphanage in Beirut. Some of these film-makers were Palestinians, as in the case of Marwan Salamah’s Aida (1985), Husein Bastouni’s Where the Jasmine Always Blooms (2024), and Yvann Yagchi’s There Was Nothing Here Before (2024). But there were also films by Israelis, as in Edna Politi’s For the Palestinians (1973), and Americans, such as Tal Barda’s I Shall Not Hate (2024). There was even a relic from the dusty archives of the GDR, Solidarity in Action (1970), echoing the same long-running call for Palestinian self-determination.
With their varied time periods, styles and arguments, these films represent a necessary counterbalance to the rising racist and anti-Arab rhetoric sadly gaining more ground in the German public sphere. Screening them in Leipzig, a city where the vocally anti-immigrant AfD party scored second place in the latest elections, was a strong statement by the festival in an era when pro-Palestinian voices calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon are increasingly subject to restrictions by the German government.
Pleas for a ceasefire in Gaza even crept into Being John Smith, the latest mischievously funny work from veteran British avant-garde film-maker John Smith, which won the Golden Dove for Best Short in the festival’s International Documentary category. Although notionally about the director’s extremely common name, this bittersweet mini-memoir also digresses into politics, medical issues, self confidence, and the career of Smith’s former student Jarvis Cocker, singer with the band Pulp.
Scattered across Leipzig, on the festival’s more experimental fringes, cinema and music, visual art and live performance collide. One of this year’s glorious left-field highlights was Spinning Dreams and Beats at the charmingly grungy boho theatre venue Schaubühne Lindenfels, a hybrid concert event which featured multiple films made using a phenakistiscope, one of the earliest animation devices, from its 19th century origins to today. This show was headlined by London-based audio-visual duo Sculpture, who blended ear-bashing electronic soundscapes with modern phenakistiscopic graphics, using a spinning DJ turntable to project surreal, psychedelic imagery directly onto a big screen. How many film festivals deliver mind-bending avant-garde performance art rooted in antique steampunk technology? DOK Leipzig may be a serious-minded festival, but it also knows how to party.
