Leipzig 2026: The Verdict

At the award ceremony of the 69th edition of DOK Leipzig in Germany, the top Golden Dove awards in the feature-length International Documentary and the International Short Film sections went to films that had a common theme: terrorised people being hunted by the authorities of the states in which they live. Both festival winners signalled a strong concern with government control and the resurgence of authoritarianism around the globe in some of the most urgent and powerful documentaries of the moment.

Belarusian director Andrei Kutsila, currently living in exile in Poland, won a Golden Dove for his haunting feature Letters from the Silenced Country. The film adeptly blends frank testimony and video footage with animation based on drawings from prison, presenting a collection of experiences of citizens targeted for their activism since the mass protests of 2020 in Belarus against Alexander Lukashenko’s regime.

They’re Here, a powerful American short co-directed by Rachel Mueller and Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar in 2015 for Citizenfour, also won a Golden Dove. Playing out like an ominous horror, it portrays the fear at street level caused by the tactics of the agency ICE against undocumented immigrants and observers, during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis earlier in the year under the Trump administration.

Both awards were decided by the three-person jury of Raul Nino Zambrano, Ivan Ramljak, and Diana El Jeiroudi.

The Golden Dove for feature-length International Animated Film, awarded by a jury made up of Waltraud Grausgruber, Edmunds Jansons and Matea Radic, went to Chris Sullivan’s The Orbit of Minor Satellites, which immerses the viewer in the inner world and perceptions of a psychiatric patient with schizophrenia, and her therapy sessions with the doctor treating her.

DOK Leipzig proved to be in safe hands under the new stewardship of Polish-born artistic and festival director Ola Staszel, who took over from Christophe Terhechte this year. She delivered a 69th edition of documentaries and animation films that strengthened the festival’s roots in the regional east of the country, with a new Fokus Ost section dedicating space to East German voices to create dialogue and bridge a growing gap between east and west. That section opened with Ina Borrmann’s Guten Abend, du Schoene, featuring several subjects of Maxie Wander’s 1977 collection of monologues from women in East Germany. In the new film, they reflect back on their contributions from the perspective of today, reaffirming the idea that the personal and previously hidden is political, and that these supposedly ordinary lives have a vital place in the grand sweep of history.

Acclaimed Czech documentarian Helena Trestikova, whose work also turns on the raw and intimate lived experience of often marginalised and otherwise forgotten individuals, was a guest at this year’s festival, where she gave a two-hour masterclass on her career and shooting methods. She was honoured with an homage screening of some of her best-known time-lapse documentaries spanning decades, including 2008’s Rene about a subject frequently incarcerated for petty crimes, and 2017’s A Marriage Story, which charts the ups and downs of a couple from their wedding onward.

Norwegian studio Trollfilm was the focus of the animated film salute this year. Two programs — one dedicated to the work of Trollfilm founder Anita Killi, and another to other Trollfilm works — celebrated the 31-year-old independent studio, which specialises in animation using the multiplane cut-out technique.

This edition of DOK Leipzig also saw, under Staszel, a strengthened commitment to the inclusion of Palestinian experiences in the programme, at a time German festivals are facing intense global scrutiny over their handling of Israeli and Palestinian representation. Concrete Land, Asmahan Bkerat’s intimate portrait of an Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family, clearly resonated with the jury, and it came away with the Silver Dove Feature-Length Film award for the up-and-coming director.