Greetings from the historic Old Town at the heart of Leipzig, where the cobbled streets and grand squares are carpeted with fallen leaves painted in 50 shades of autumn. But the brightest colours on display here belong to the blazing red banners of DOK Leipzig film festival, whose 67th edition has just opened with the world premiere of Thomas Riedelsheimer’s spectacular science-driven documentary Tracing Light. In-keeping with the festival’s accessible, democratic, socially engaged spirit, this gala event occurred at the same time as a free public screening of the lyrical, life-affirming Flowers of Ukraine by Adelina Borets, which drew a packed crowd to the cavernous eastern entrance hall of the city’s monumental main train station.
In his opening speech, DOK Leipzig festival director Christoph Terhechte stressed the importance of film as a platform for discussion, debate and fruitful disagreement. “We firmly believe that cinema allows us to tolerate opposing viewpoints and enables dialogue between them,” he told the assembled audience of local dignitaries, film-makers and industry insiders. “Only by doing this can we can come together to promote peace and coexistence.”
Billing itself as the word’s oldest documentary festival, with a growing sideline in animation and more experimental visual artworks, DOK Leipzig certainly has a long history as a showcase for critical voices and free-thinking debate. It began life in 1955 under East Germany’s old Communist regime, launched partly with the intention to show that Eastern Bloc nations could also handle a diversity of views. With delicious irony, it was subsequently banned several times for failing to follow the official Party line. Even films from socialist “brother” countries like Poland and Yugoslavia were sidelined when they dared to take an overly independent stance. Three decades later, Leipzig played a crucial role in the peaceful protests that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Given the resurgence of volatile Cold War tensions between Russia and the West, it makes sense that DOK Leipzig has returned to the cultural frontline in recent years, this time fighting a new tyrant in the Kremlin. The festival program this year includes multiple films that challenge Moscow rule, both then and now: films like Tomasz Wolski’s excellent found-footage portrait of Poland under martial law, A Year in the Life of the Country, and Elina Mikaberidze’s emotionally charged Blueberry Dreams, an intimate study of precarious lives in modern-day Georgia, which is currently struggling against Russian military and political domination.
In light of the ongoing horrors of the war raging between Israel and Palestine, films informed by the conflict also pack extra punch in Leipzig. Tal Barda’s I Shall Not Hate is a a richly layered portrait of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, a feted Palestinian gynaecologist working in an Israeli hospital, while Yvann Yagchi’s There Was Nothing Here Before examines the painful growing rift between the Swiss-based Palestinian director and his Jewish best friend. Both are screening in the festival’s Audience Competition section
Closer to home, DOK Leipzig’s latest German Competition strand includes nine features, all world premieres, and almost all directed by women, covering subjects that veer from playful to political to deeply strange. While Sabine Herpich’s Barbara Morgenstern: Doing It for Love serves up a charmingly quirky pop-singer bio-doc, Jennifer Mallmann’s Moria Six dissects the legally troubling case of six young men charged with starting a fire at a Greek refugee camp, and Kristina Shtubert’s Abode of Dawn explores a messianic religious community deep in the Siberian wilderness.
Beyond the main screening program, the festival’s more experimental, immersive, VR and AR sidebar DOK Neuland has also been expanded this year, with digital artworks and installations now scattered across four different locations around the city. A hotly anticipated highlight of this program is Nothing Can Ever Be The Same by Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes, which began life at the Venice Biennale as a 168-hour “generative” audio-visual collage drawing on the video archive and creative methods of veteran avant-rock composer Brian Eno.
Hustwit later distilled this material into his innovative shape-shifting biographical documentary Eno, which premiered at Sundance in January. But now a newly condensed remix of the original sense-swamping artwork will be screening in an art gallery in Leipzig’s southern suburbs all this week, slimmed down to a relatively modest six-hour runtime. A lively crossroads between pop and politics, art and activism, debate and dissent, DOK Leipzig is always one of the most stimulating events in the film festival calendar. A week of blazing autumn colours and sparky critical voices, both on screen and off, lies ahead.