Film Archive

Extended Reality 2022
Filmstill [Posthuman Wombs]
[Posthuman Wombs]
Anna Fries, Malu Peeters
This auto-theoretical essay explores the womb of a posthuman, questioning stereotypical ideas of pregnancy and speculating about non-binary reproduction scenarios.
Filmstill [Posthuman Wombs]

[Posthuman Wombs]

[Posthuman Wombs]
Anna Fries, Malu Peeters
Extended Reality 2022
XR
Germany,
Netherlands,
Switzerland
2021
20 minutes
English

The stereotypical idea of pregnancy is a challenge for persons who do not define themselves as female only. This auto-theoretical essay explores the future of the family and non-binary reproduction scenarios in which all bodies can become pregnant. We travel into the womb of a posthuman and follow speculations about the de-feminisation of childbearing.

Lars Rummel

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Anna Fries, Malu Peeters
Animation
Lisa Kaschubat, Manuel Tozzi
VR Developer
Ambrus Ivanyos
3D Artist
Lisa Kaschubat, Manuel Tozzi, Danielle Williams
Creative Technologist
Ambrus Ivanyos
Sound
Malu Peeters
Script
Anna Fries
Score
Malu Peeters
Performer
Brandy Butler, Anna Fries, Olivia Hyunsin Kim, Ncube as Bibi, Fercha Pombo, Kübra Uzun, Wheelymum
Director
Anna Fries, Malu Peeters
Filmstill 1976: Search for Life

1976: Search for Life

1976: Search for Life
Tess Martin
International Competition Animated Film 2023
Animated Film
Netherlands
2023
11 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing

A new father takes his wife and daughter on a journey to his mother’s birthplace in Scotland. It is 1976 – the year in which NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 space probes land on the surface of Mars. They send images of an only vaguely explored area from a great distance, enabling a first look into the history of an alien planet. Like the NASA scientists, the small family are hoping that their journey will give them insights into the past, an understanding of the present situation and perhaps even the chance to anticipate the future.

Texts from the father’s travel diary, photos and video recordings are interwoven with visual and sound material from the NASA archives to form a multilayered narrative that navigates several decades of family history, cosmological questions and philosophical reflections. A filmic multiverse unfolds before us whose elementary particles oscillate between times and worlds, between reality and fiction.

Franka Sachse

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Tess Martin
Cinematographer
Matija Pekić
Nominated for: mephisto 97.6 Audience Award
Animation Night 2023
Filmstill 1976: Search for Life – Installation
1976: Search for Life – Installation
Tess Martin
The documentary video for the installation version of the short film “1976: Search for Life” takes us to Mars. There, a small television set shows a very personal story.
Filmstill 1976: Search for Life – Installation

1976: Search for Life – Installation

1976: Search for Life – Installation
Tess Martin
Animation Night 2023
Documentary Film
Netherlands
2023
11 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

The documentary video for the installation version of the short film “1976: Search for Life” takes us to Mars. There – between huge boulders and in the red light of our sibling planet – we find a small television set. With headphones and in an intimate atmosphere, Tess Martin shares a very personal memory of an important historical event with us.

Franka Sachse

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Tess Martin
Filmstill An Asian Ghost Story

An Asian Ghost Story

An Asian Ghost Story
Bo Wang
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Hong Kong,
Netherlands
2023
37 minutes
Cantonese,
English
Subtitles: 
English

Narrated by the incarnate ghost of a deceased real hair donor. In the post-war era, the export of real hair wigs contributed to Asia’s economic development, with Hong Kong as a major hub. In its heyday in the 1960s, “Asian real hair” was popular with wealthy U.S. women, but then the USA imposed an embargo on the product, now classified as “communist hair”. This is where the intricate and innovatively realised story begins: Starting with complex economical and sociopolitical contexts, it weaves a thread that runs through various historical and dreamlike staged levels.

Hong Kong was and is a space of in-between-ness – between East and West, between communism and capitalism. Perhaps that is why there are so many spooks in the city, one protagonist speculates. Just like the well-travelled ghost, an eternally wandering entity and contemporary witness of an imperial and colonialist past.

Annina Wettstein

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Bo Wang
Script
Bo Wang
Cinematographer
Yavuz Selim Isler, Fai Wan
Editor
Bo Wang
Producer
Ruoyao Jane Yao, Jia Zhao
Sound
Franco van der Linde
Sound Design
Jeroen Goeijers
Narrator
Jia Zhao, Hamza Junaid, Tommy Tse
Winner of: Golden Dove Short Film (International Competition Documentary Film)
Extended Reality 2023
Filmstill Elele
Elele
Sjoerd van Acker
We let Max Cooper’s music take over our hands. They get to dance on a virtual, hypnotic stage: intuitively, playfully, gracefully. Anything goes.
Filmstill Elele

Elele

Elele
Sjoerd van Acker
Extended Reality 2023
XR
Netherlands
2022
7 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

In the midst of a blue-violet tinted mountain range are the remains of a lonely pavilion. Accompanied by the music of Max Cooper, this setting becomes the stage of a dance performance – in which our hands play the leading roles. Intuitively we let the rhythm take them over, move them playfully, form graceful gestures. At this hypnotic place everything is possible for the dancers.

Lars Rummel

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Firat Sezgin, Ecegül Bayram
Production Company
Institute of Time
Artistic Design
Tolga Tarhan, Gamze Yavuz
Score
Max Cooper
Director
Sjoerd van Acker
Animation Night 2023
Filmstill Ginevra
Ginevra
Tess Martin
A young woman is strangled. The mother’s moving dirge – based on a poem by Percy Shelley – accompanies us as her daughter Ginevra is laid out and resurrects.
Filmstill Ginevra

Ginevra

Ginevra
Tess Martin
Animation Night 2023
Animated Film
USA,
Netherlands
2017
4 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
English

The rising sun reveals a gruesome crime. In the orange-red dawn, between the dunes and the rippling sea, a young woman is strangled to death. The victim’s neck is marked by the deep imprints of her murderer’s hands. The mother’s moving dirge – based on a poem by Percy Shelley – accompanies us as her daughter Ginevra is laid out and resurrects.

Franka Sachse

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Tess Martin
Producer
Max Rothman
Sound Design
Jeremy Lloyd-Styles
Score
Jeremy Lloyd-Styles
Animation
Tess Martin
Animation Night 2023
Filmstill How to Make a Phonotrope Video with Drawn Animation
How to Make a Phonotrope Video with Drawn Animation
Tess Martin
Tess Martin introduces us to a technique for producing animation loops: Make a drawing, take a rotating disc, connect it to a camera – and your phonotrope is ready.
Filmstill How to Make a Phonotrope Video with Drawn Animation

How to Make a Phonotrope Video with Drawn Animation

How to Make a Phonotrope Video with Drawn Animation
Tess Martin
Animation Night 2023
Documentary Film
Netherlands
2019
8 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

A device that can create the illusion of movement can be built by coupling the speed of a rotating disc to the recording frame rate of a camera. This so-called phonotrope is a contemporary version of the phenakistiscope. In her how-to video, Tess Martin explains how this technique works and how it was used in her film “Orbit.”

Franka Sachse

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Tess Martin
Cinematographer
Tess Martin, Oana Clitan
Producer
Tess Martin
Score
Podington Bear
Extended Reality: DOK Neuland 2021
Media Name: 96ff45ec-fb95-4c03-a562-51424249eecb.jpg
Infomorph
Arash Akbari
We are guided through a speculative posthumanist scenario revolving around the relationship between humans, machines and nature. An AI helps with the transition into the digital.
Media Name: 96ff45ec-fb95-4c03-a562-51424249eecb.jpg

Infomorph

Infomorph
Arash Akbari
Extended Reality 2021
-
Iran,
Netherlands
2021
10 minutes
English

We meet an artificial intelligence designed to ease our transition into the digital. Life in the analogue world is no longer possible, not even necessary. The VR experience guides us through a speculative scenario that illuminates the relationship between humans, machines and nature in posthumanism. Texts, images and sounds were created by means of AI and algorithms.

Lars Rummel

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

VR Developer
Arash Akbari
Interactive Design
Arash Akbari
Creative Technologist
Arash Akbari
Coding
Arash Akbari
Sound
Farzaneh Nouri
Score
Farzaneh Nouri
Director
Arash Akbari
Media Name: 40d55796-ed34-42a5-9f8c-20ea15595822.jpg

Lamentations of Judas

Les lamentations de Judas
Boris Gerrets
Camera Lucida – Out of Competition 2020
Documentary Film
Netherlands,
France
2020
94 minutes
English,
Portuguese (Portugal)
Subtitles: 
English

A group of old men in an abandoned asbestos mining town on the edge of the Kalahari Desert resist evacuation. They have no place to go because they were once notorious as soldiers of the infamous South African Battalion 32, also known as “The Terrible Ones”. Both perpetrators and victims of history, they become actors in the biblical story of Judas Iscariot in Boris Gerrets’ equally disturbing and fascinating cinematic legacy.

The spectacle under a blazing sun confronts the men, who live in abject poverty, with their unresolved past. Many of them had been forcibly recruited by the FNLA and UNITA resistance movements in the Angolan War of Independence against Portugal. After the communist MPLA took power, they found themselves as mercenaries fighting alongside white South Africans against their own people and finally defending the Apartheid regime in the colonial struggle in Namibia and the South African townships. On the fringes of the surreal film location between the decaying buildings of the old mining town, they speak for the first time about their life stories, talk about betrayal, guilt and remorse. Having been steamrolled by global politics, turned into undesirables, exiles, forgotten, suppressed and broken men, they finally become visible again as human beings in front of the camera.
Christoph Terhechte

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Boris Gerrets
Cinematographer
Nic Hofmeyr
Editor
Boris Gerrets
Producer
Iris Lammertsma, Boudewijn Koole
Co-Producer
Eric Velthuis, Serge Lalou, Camille Laemle
Sound
President Kapa, Dominique Vieillard
Score
Thuthuka Sibisi
Media Name: 172995f8-20e2-47f9-bcc9-3020bfee2973.jpg

Looking for Horses

Looking for Horses
Stefan Pavlović
Doc Alliance Selection 2021
Documentary Film
Netherlands,
Bosnia & Herzegovina,
France
2021
88 minutes
Bosnian,
English
Subtitles: 
English

Two men by themselves: Zdravko, a war veteran with a hearing impairment who lives as a fisherman in the wilderness, and Stefan, a director with Bosnian roots who has forgotten his mother tongue. The unlikely friendship develops against a both sparse and mysterious background. For while Stefan superimposes his thoughts in text form on the shots, Zdravko sends sounds into the depth with a wooden stick. They are meant to attract catfish that make their rounds in a lake. In the process, the two men summon each other, so to speak, bring to light what was buried, fraternize, overcome inner barriers.

Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Stefan Pavlović
Cinematographer
Stefan Pavlović
Editor
Sabine Groenewegen, Stefan Pavlović
Producer
Koštana Banović
Co-Producer
Eyal Sivan
Sound
Stefan Pavlović
Score
Karsten Fundal
World Sales
Anna Berthollet
Filmstill Love Is Not an Orange

Love Is Not an Orange

Love Is Not an Orange
Otilia Babara
Panorama Middle and Eastern Europe 2022
Documentary Film
Belgium,
Moldova,
Netherlands,
France
2022
73 minutes
Romanian
Subtitles: 
English

“Imagine this camera is your mother”, a father tells his daughter. In the 1990s, scores of families from the Republic of Moldova began a ritualised mail exchange between the mothers, who had emigrated for economic reasons, and their relatives back home. The former sent money and goods; the latter sent videotapes. These amateur recordings are the material of this film. They testify to the painful gaps the absent persons left in the lives of those who stayed behind.

Migration is a big factor in post-socialist states buffeted by recession and inflation after the end of the Soviet Union – and in this case, also by the civil war over Transnistria. According to data from 2011/2012, about a third of Moldovan children had one parent abroad. In this small country between Romania and the Ukraine, too, a higher percentage of fathers choose work migration. Otilia Babara, however, is specifically interested in the consequences of long absent mothers, who work for nursing services in Italy, for example, to earn their family’s livelihood, and who express their love through care packages. The loss of connection to their mother – all of whom stay out of the frame –, which affects girls in particular, emerges in the cracks of the staged home videos, when wandering glances reveal that the children no longer believe in their return.
Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Otilia Babara
Script
Otilia Babara
Editor
Pierpaolo Filomeno
Producer
Hanne Phlypo
Co-Producer
Christine Camdessus, Simone van den Broek, Otilia Babara
Sound
Mark Glynne
Sound Design
Olmo van Straalen
Nominated for: MDR Film Prize
Animation Night 2023
Filmstill Mario
Mario
Tess Martin
A macabre, hypnotic children’s song about Mario the soldier and his disappointed love announces a brutal murder. Images of memories flow into each other and make us shiver.
Filmstill Mario

Mario

Mario
Tess Martin
Animation Night 2023
Animated Film
Netherlands,
USA
2014
3 minutes
Italian
Subtitles: 
English

A macabre Italian children’s song tells the story of Mario, a soldier who returns from war and must learn that his girlfriend has left him for another man. Mario decides to kill her. The film picks up on the ambivalent mood of the song and reinforces its vibration in the space between blithe children’s game and brutal murder.

Franka Sachse

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Tess Martin
Producer
Tess Martin
Score
Jason Staczek
Animation
Tess Martin
Re-Visions 2021
Media Name: 50969d83-f957-4e09-9d7b-6b4ce77eca55.jpg
Mother Dao, the Turtlelike
Vincent Monnikendam
“A kinematographic image of the Dutch-Indies 1912 – c.1933”, assembled from silent footage commissioned by the colonial rulers, learns to speak: in the stories of the colonized.
Media Name: 50969d83-f957-4e09-9d7b-6b4ce77eca55.jpg

Mother Dao, the Turtlelike

Moeder Dao, de schildpadgelijkende
Vincent Monnikendam
Re-Visions 2021
Documentary Film
Netherlands
1995
88 minutes
Dutch,
Indonesian
Subtitles: 
English

Vincent Monnikendam calls his archive film “a kinematographic image of the Dutch-Indies 1912 – c. 1933” in the subtitle, echoing the ponderous bureaucratic language of the Dutch authorities who at the time commissioned the footage he re-edited. He condensed some 280,000 metres of nitrate film, shot by professionals but left largely uncut, into a compilation about indigenous people and their immigrant rulers in the former colony. The originally silent footage begins to speak – not in an explanatory voiceover, but in the songs and stories of the colonized. The images are unchanged. But they have to be read in a new way.

Sylvia Görke

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Vincent Monnikendam
Script
Vincent Monnikendam
Cinematographer
Vincent Monnikendam, Hans van der Marck
Editor
Licky Zydower, Albert Markus
Producer
Rade Miličević
Score
Jan-Dries Groenendijk
Audience Competition 2023
Filmstill My Father, Nour and I
My Father, Nour and I
Wiam Al-Zabari
Twenty years ago, the filmmaker fled from Bagdad with his family – why has always been a taboo. For his son, he breaks his silence in this filmic family therapy.
Filmstill My Father, Nour and I

My Father, Nour and I

Mijn vader, Nour en ik
Wiam Al-Zabari
Audience Competition 2023
Documentary Film
Netherlands
2023
56 minutes
Dutch,
Arabic
Subtitles: 
German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing, English

Twenty years ago, filmmaker Wiam Al-Zabari fled Baghdad with his family in the middle of the night. His father, a dissident former ambassador, had already escaped from Iraq and was waiting for them in the Netherlands. Since then, no one in the family has ever spoken about the events. What exactly happened was always a taboo. Now that Wiam has become a father himself, he realises that his past life is catching up with him and that more and more questions are arising, the biggest being: Why did they have to flee in the first place? Wiam wants to finally find out. For the first time, he breaks the silence and begins to research the past in dialogues with his parents and siblings. Above all he wants to prevent passing on these traumatic experiences to his son.

In this filmic family therapy, he addresses Nour, his little son, directly. Wiam promised himself and the boy this film to clear up the long-suppressed themes in a way that will allow Nour to feel firm ground under his feet when he is grown up. In doing so, Wiam is unsparingly honest with himself and his relatives and chooses a number of unusual artistic tricks. For example, he inserts himself as a director from offscreen, critically analysing his own position in the fabric of speaking and silence: an attempted inside view from the outside.

Lina Dinkla

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Wiam Al-Zabari
Cinematographer
Niels van Koevorden, Jefrim Rothuizen, Wiam Al-Zabari
Editor
Augustine Huijsser, Renko Douze, Wiam Al-Zabari
Producer
Hasse van Nunen, Iris Lammertsma, Renko Douze, Boudewijn Koole
Sound
Tim van Peppen, Gideon Bijlsma
Sound Design
Jacob Oostra
Score
Alaa Arsheed, Haian Arsheed
Filmstill On Taphonomy

On Taphonomy

On Taphonomy
Ana María Gómez López
Competition for the Audience Award Short Film 2022
Documentary Film
Netherlands
2021
9 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
English

A life dedicated to decay. Johannes Weigelt (1890–1948) was a palaeontologist, a dilettante photographer, a Nazi, all of it fervent. This essay is dedicated to the pioneer of taphonomy – sober and at the same time exciting in form. Three image fields are filled with changing content: black and white documents of fields of animal carcasses, a snapshot with Göring, text panels, artful photomontages. They all charge one another, containing a vibrantly shimmering biography fossilised in images.

Sylvia Görke

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Ana María Gómez López
Cinematographer
Ana María Gómez López
Editor
Sasha Donkan
Producer
Ana María Gómez López
Sound
Mayvand Kasem Dad
Animation Night 2023
Filmstill Orbit
Orbit
Tess Martin
Drawings on rotating discs guide us through the cycle of life on earth, make us feel the rhythm of nature and tell of the origins of the moving image.
Filmstill Orbit

Orbit

Orbit
Tess Martin
Animation Night 2023
Animated Film
Netherlands
2019
7 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

As we watch individual details and their interplay as a whole, presented on rotating discs, we get a spark of insight into the interactions of flora and fauna on earth and the elemental power of our central star, the sun. Temporality, rhythm and the functioning of film are hinted at. A look at the origins of life and the moving image.

Franka Sachse

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Tess Martin
Cinematographer
Matija Pekić
Score
Jason Staczek
Animation
Tess Martin