In a cabin in the forest, Jean and Mana listen to various animal species and catalogue voice recordings. When they hear unfamiliar sounds, their curiosity to uncover a secret is aroused.
Jean lives as a hermit in a forest. From his cabin, he listens to and records the sounds of the animals that inhabit the surrounding area. One night, he hears the cry of an unknown animal. Along with Mana, a young girl who sings with the birds, he goes in search of the mysterious creature.
A ghost ride through Finnish TV archives of the 1960s grazes the moon landing, American TV shows, a war in Africa. But how to connect with the world when dancing is forbidden?!
The anonymous narrator is a kind of web-adventurous flâneuse, neurotic and endlessly curious. A disturbance in the proprioception, which is the ability to sense the position, movement and location of the body and its parts, makes her perceive the world in a new way. Seemingly random anecdotes found on the internet and instructions from her cryptic physiotherapist start to come together in surprising ways. The found material forms a mosaic that reflects a world full of gazes, rules and technologies that separate us. Lines from the present and the distant past take our narrator to the 1960s, where medieval dance bans, televised wars, lost bones, space utopias and American TV stars collide. This film reflects how we can be and live in the world within ourselves and with each other. With those who are near and with those who are far. Along with all this, the film recommends dancing to everyone.
Anxious in Beirut is a personal diary that documents the events of the last two years in Lebanon – revolution, post-war, explosions, demonstrations. Living with constant anxiety, Zakaria, the film’s young director, narrates his own life while trying, on numerous occasions, to leave his country.
A journey through places and times that shaped the life of Turkish writer and human rights activist Aslı Erdoğan. She writes against silence, especially in exile.
Shattered photos, excerpts from newspapers and pieces of words become voices that spread through the alleys of a city until they reach the house of a writer, who’s writing a page. These fragmented voices tell the story of Aslı Erdogan, a Turkish author forced to live in exile in Europe after being imprisoned for her political ideas.
The voices narrate her life, from her childhood in Istanbul and her feminist commitment to the years as a researcher in Switzerland, the fugue to Brazil before returning to Istanbul, the heart of her lost country. Footage of travel and migration in search of work, images from physics laboratories, videos of protests against the authorities in Istanbul: these materials get mixed in a visual and sound flow becoming the essence of our collective memory, shared by every discriminated person, among them Aslı Erdogan during her exile. Meanwhile, the process of writing has erupted: the page contains words.
A box of film material from Tito-era Yugoslavia becomes a narrative engine. With dry wit and philosophical verve, this essay burrows through family and contemporary history.
The sixties and the seventies of the 20th century in our former country, a country that ceased to be. A young family moves from a rural environment to a small Slovenian town, where factories are being built and the need for a workforce is increasing. The brothers are growing up in that shaky but magical in-between, soaked in the everyday rhythms of the community, infused with the ideology of the time. Then, it happens: the sudden spectrum of film; the mystique of time itself.
22 years after they established the women's organisation Machsom Watch, its founders reveal what really happened at the checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank.
22 years after they established the women's organisation Machsom Watch, its founders reveal what really happened at the checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank between 2002 and 2012. This is the story of a group of courageous women who dedicated their lives to safeguarding human rights and peace.
The film is built on 9 short stories of the women who participate in the film. Each one of them is adding a personal view of the daily routine of the checkpoint that together crate a very powerful and moving document.
A man on an e-scooter on the outskirts of the city. Only the rifle over his shoulder irritates. The mood of high alert is deceptive. The disaster has already happened.
Frieda, Viola and Jilou are three of the most successful women in the male-dominated breakdance world. At different points in their careers, each of them faces serious challenges.
Who says that women can't break dance? Frieda, Viola and Jilou are three of the most successful women in the male-dominated breaking world. The movie shows their tough training methods, their dance performances at international battles and their personal backgrounds that drive them to fulfil their dreams. The three friends are at different points in their sports careers and thus face new challenges and decisions that will change their lives.
B-girl Jilou is at the height of her career and counts as one of the best in the world. With her extraordinary determination, she is currently winning one battle after the other, whereas Frieda is still grappling with an injury. As a B-girl ever since the emergence of break dancing, she has to come to terms with the fact that her advancing age means she can no longer rely on her body and has to find a life outside of her professional sports career. B-girl Viola is focused on becoming recognised as a dancer and combines breaking with modern dance. For her, every battle is equally a fight for her identity as an artist.
Dancing Heartbeats is an inspiring portrait of courage, endurance, the power of one's passion, and what it means to be a young woman who is fighting for acknowledgement and equal rights.
Deserters is a film about a generation of Bosnian youth from the city of Mostar swept by the devastating war at the brink of their maturity and the tough decision to escape from it.
Deserters is a film about a generation of Bosnian youth from the city of Mostar swept by the devastating war at the brink of their maturity and the tough decision to escape from it. Their exile stories from the 90s, contained in letters mailed to the director of this film from refugee camps scattered across Europe, are confronted with the present condition of the city they were forced to leave. A film about a missing generation, exile, hard choices, and the answer to the most difficult question of any war: to stay or to run?
Srećko, Mirza and Mejra are survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Their fates are revealed in the contrast between innocent everyday moments today and archive images from that period.
The rescue of 104 castaways in the Mediterranean, person by person, step by step, in a real time documentary. Help against the clock – and the organised ignorance of the authorities.
How a sea rescue happens is beyond imagination. The documentary One Hundred and Four brings this dramatic situation closer through the rescuers' perspective.
Shortly after the distress call, several cameras accompany different situations simultaneously. Different angles offer the possibility to set a unique focus on the actions taking place in parallel. The uncut real-time documentary begins during the search for the dinghy ahead of the refugee boat and ends with the successful rescue. The situation comes to a head with the appearance of the Libyan Coast Guard and the political situation leaves the crew and the rescued people in distress for several days, as no Mediterranean country allows them to come to shore. Only after several days and an approaching thunderstorm, is a European port reached.
Golden Dove Feature-Length Film, Film Prize Leipziger Ring, Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize, ver.di Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness, German Competition Documentary Film, DOK Leipzig, Germany (2023)
A refugee camp built in Egypt in 1944 becomes the social model for Tito’s Yugoslavia. Archive material and contemporary witnesses tell a lived social-utopian origin story.
Frozen and starved people on boats in the Mediterranean Sea, fleeing from war. Scenes we are used to seeing in the news. But it's 1944, and refugees are travelling to Africa. Thirty thousand Dalmatians fled from the Nazis to live in tents in the Egyptian desert – making a utopian communist “model village”. This is a story about them.
Emile Zuckerkandl talks about his grandmother's salon, Hitler's arrival, and his escape to Algeria. A network of personal memories interwoven with world history.
Emile Zuckerkandl jotted down in his diary, “I write it down, so that I can remember it later.” Eighty years later, his memories are vivid and clear when he talks about his grandmother's salon, Hitler's arrival after the “Anschluss,” and his escape to Algeria. Rainer Frimmel stays very close to his charismatic protagonist in recording a network of personal memories interwoven with world history.
Els is in her late forties, divorced and in love again. For her, falling in love was not easy: it meant that she had to accept, that she has a life even if her twenty-year-old daughter wants to die and has already asked for psychiatric euthanasia which her mother can do nothing about. In the storm of her own emotions, mixed with guilt, anger, fear and hope, love is what teaches Els to try stepping forward even if it seems impossible.
Falling is a lyrical, found-footage-based testimony from a mother who faces not only the taboos surrounding motherhood but also the most difficult situation in her life.
In 1943, Hitler ordered the destruction of Marseilles' oldest neighbourhood. Today, the last survivours fight to have this tragedy recognised as a crime against humanity.
The film follows the last survivors of this tragedy, as they deliver a last attempt to break the silence around these forgotten Nazi crimes. Through their direct accounts, the film also recounts the terrible days of the round-up, when France's oldest neighbourhood was raised to the ground and the life of hundreds of families, most of them first or second-generation migrants, was destroyed forever.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.