Film Archive

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among us women

Unter uns Frauen
Sarah Noa Bozenhardt, Daniel Abate Tilahun
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Ethiopia,
Germany
2021
92 minutes
Amharic,
English
Subtitles: 
English

In rural Ethiopia the staff of a health centre are fighting maternal mortality. They tirelessly appeal to women to give birth in the clinic. But reservations are strong, and so are the practical obstacles. How are heavily pregnant women supposed to arrive in time when the ambulance comes hours later or not at all? Against medical advice, Hulu Ager decides to give birth at home, assisted by a traditional midwife.

With palpable familiarity, the film crew captures moments of intimate communion between Hulu Ager, the midwives and other women. On the margins of the central conflict, the many challenges they face in a patriarchal society emerge. The debates are most lively under the hood dryer at the hairdresser’s: She doesn’t enjoy sex because of her circumcision, the medical professional Welela reports. “Sometimes you have to prepare yourself for sex,” another customer advises. Sometimes it helps to get drunk. But the perky hairdresser is sure: Bad sex is grounds for divorce. The women share their desires and woes with each other, experience solidarity and gather courage for small and great acts of departure and resistance. Men are relegated to the role of extras, if at all.
Sarina Lacaf

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Sarah Noa Bozenhardt, Daniel Abate Tilahun
Script
Sarah Noa Bozenhardt
Cinematographer
Bernarda Cornejo Pinto
Editor
Andrea Munoz
Producer
Sonja Kilbertus
Co-Producer
Hiwot Admasu, Beza Hailu Lemma
Sound
Alex Praet
Score
Anna-Marlene Bicking
Winner of: Honourable Mendtion (International Competition)
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Anxious Body

Fuan na karada
Yoriko Mizushiri
International Competition Short Film 2021
Animated Film
France,
Japan
2021
6 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

Tszzzzidd – skin and adhesive tape separate slowly, almost lasciviously. From a sober physical point of view, forces between molecular bonds are being overcome. Yoriko Mizushiri composes brief, highly sensual variations on pain and pleasure based on this phenomenon. Restrained, calm and scalpel-sharp, she creates two-dimensional drawn animations in subdued colours, accompanied by cool electronic sounds that explode in one’s head only to scatter into the anxious but curious body.

André Eckardt

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Yoriko Mizushiri
Producer
Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, Pierre Baussaron, Nobuaki Doi / New Deer
World Sales
Luce Grosjean
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Atomu

Atomu
Shariffa Ali, Yetunde Dada
Extended Reality 2021
-
France,
Kenya,
USA,
UK
2020
12 minutes
English

In the mythology of the Kikuyu community the Mugumo, the Kenyan fig tree, represents transformation and rebirth. This multiplayer VR experience invites us to witness a sacred ritual: Dancing around the Mugumo can turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man. We follow Waicici, a genderless person, in the quest for the most honest version of themselves.

Lars Rummel

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Producer
Antoine Cayrol, Steve Jelly
Co-Producer
Steve Jelly, Arnaud Colinart, Opeyemi Olukemi, Rafael Pavon, Annick Jakobowicz, Simon Windsor
Production Company
POV Spark, France Télévisions, Dimension, Atlas V
Choreographer
Stephen Buescher
Key Collaborator
Andrew Orkin, Banna Dasta, Toby Coffey, Steve Jelly, Simon Windsor, Akash Kushwaha, Annick Jakobowicz, Stephen Buescher, Opeyemi Olukemi, Arnaud Colinart, Rafael Pavon, Antoine Cayrol, Derren Sinnott
Director
Shariffa Ali, Yetunde Dada
Retrospective 2021
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Respite
Harun Farocki
Material from the Nazi Jewish transit camp Westerbork. Every road from here lead to death, including for the cameraman. Farocki analyzes the silent sequences: surgery on the narrative.
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Respite

Aufschub
Harun Farocki
Retrospective 2021
Documentary Film
Germany,
South Korea
2007
40 minutes
German captions
Subtitles: 
None

Anyone interned in the Nazi Jewish transit and collection camp Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands faced death: The trains left to Auschwitz from here, to Sobibór. In 1944, the camp commander ordered the prisoner and cameraman Rudolf Breslauer, who was murdered shortly afterwards, to film the camp, presumably as visual evidence of his own “work performance”. Harun Farocki, West German doyen of essayistic image criticism, used the surviving silent material to compose an equally silent sequence analysis commented only in title cards. It is surgery on the hidden narrative, not open heart surgery.

Sylvia Görke

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Director
Harun Farocki
Script
Harun Farocki
Cinematographer
Rudolf Breslauer
Editor
Lars Pienkoß, Harun Farocki
Producer
Harun Farocki
Retrospective 2021
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Berlin-Totale XIV. 2. d) Almstadtstraße
Karl-Heinz Wegner
A production of the State Film Documentation, which was set up to preserve uncensored GDR reality: Long-term residents look back on the German-Jewish history of “their” street.
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Berlin-Totale XIV. 2. d) Almstadtstraße

Berlin-Totale XIV. 2. d) Almstadtstraße
Karl-Heinz Wegner
Retrospective 2021
Documentary Film
GDR
1979
35 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None

Why this film document about a street in East Berlin is the way it is, why it conveys an almost touching, basically unformed honesty and perplexity, is due to the specific institution it was made for. The State Film Documentation was founded to provide the GDR with uncensored testimonies of its own reality. Three long-time residents look, through notoriously draughty windows, at the notoriously chilly German-Jewish history: Herr Miegel, former pub owner, Frau Kramp, former cinema employee, Mischket Liebermann, writer and GDR cultural politician. They have been neighbours in their district forever. They will probably remain strangers to each other forever.

Sylvia Görke

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Karl-Heinz Wegner
Cinematographer
Roland Worel, Dieter Schönberg
Sound
Dieter Harms
Commissioning Editor
Veronika Otten
Retrospective 2021
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Educational Attainment of West German Pupils in the 1950s
Jürgen Neven du Mont
Hitler sold badges to come to power? And really six million murdered Jews? A knowledge test among FRG secondary school pupils where it’s actually the parents that fail.
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Educational Attainment of West German Pupils in the 1950s

Bildungsstand westdeutscher Schüler in den 50er Jahren
Jürgen Neven du Mont
Retrospective 2021
Documentary Film
FRG
1959
44 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None

On 29 April 1959, Hessian Broadcasting transmitted an alarming survey of the Federal German school system. The first of three parts of the report “Focus on Our Youth” investigates the question of what has stuck in the minds of higher form students about Hitler’s and Ulbricht’s Germanies. Hesse under Polish administration? Hitler sold badges to come to power? At least they are about right concerning the number of murdered Jews – that is, the third who could think of anything to say about this at all. One television critic rightly pointed out that this represented the sum total of all parental table talk. But were these parents watching television on 29 April 1959?

Sylvia Görke

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Director
Jürgen Neven du Mont
Cinematographer
Willy Sedler, Bernhard Weber, Günter Seuss
Editor
Hilde Grabow
Producer
HR Hessischer Rundfunk
Sound
Horst Eiteljörge
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Björk: Hunter

Björk: Hunter
Paul White
Animation and Musique concrète 2021
Experimental Film
UK
1997
4 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

Icelandic musician Björk has always merged natural and technoid creativeness. She samples and loops environmental sounds and transforms them by means of electronic effects. Paul White translates this approach and aesthetics in the video clip for “Hunter”, morphing the singing Björk’s head and human features into an artificial polar bear that seems to be made of liquid plastic.

Cornelia Friederike Müller aka CFM

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Paul White
Performer
Björk
Retrospective 2021
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Buchenwald
Günter Weschke
The Buchenwald Memorial was the first national memorial of the GDR. From 1961 to 1975, every memorial tour began with this introductory film, in which the Jewish victims are barely mentioned.
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Buchenwald

Buchenwald
Günter Weschke
Retrospective 2021
Documentary Film
GDR
1961
26 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None

The inauguration of the “National Buchenwald Memorial”, the first national memorial of the GDR, took place in 1958. The monumental site was also meant to demonstrate the state-supporting importance of a selective culture of remembrance, commemorating the communist resistance fighters – and omitting the fact that the graves were mainly filled with Jewish victims. In 1961, DEFA completed this “introductory film”, commissioned by the Buchenwald committee, which talks about Goethe, Schiller, Thälmann, but only very marginally about Jews. Every visitor’s memorial tour started with this until 1975. Its scriptwriter and production manager was the playwright Heiner Müller, a fact that was not known until 2004.

Sylvia Görke

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Director
Günter Weschke
Script
Günter Weschke, Heiner Müller
Cinematographer
Günter Weschke
Producer
DEFA-Studio für Wochenschau und Dokumentarfilme
Sound
Heinz Reusch, Kurt Wolfram
Narrator
Sergio Günther, Ekkehard Schall, Wolfgang Heinz
International Competition 2021
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Bucolic
Karol Pałka
Country life as presented by Karol Pałka is not exactly romantic: two women, a ramshackle house, the ground wet, the clothes dirty. An unconventional visit to a wasteland.
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Bucolic

Bukolika
Karol Pałka
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Poland
2021
70 minutes
Polish
Subtitles: 
German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing, English

Danusia and Basia are a mother and daughter, sharing a life presented by director Karol Pałka as supremely secluded. Far removed from any comfort, the seasons pass, a priest comes to visit, the women wade through mud and cultivate their habits. But, unnoticed by Danusia, Basia moves on a few back roads of her own that lead in other directions.

The nearest town seems light years away. Danusia and her daughter Basia lead a reclusive life in a ramshackle house in the country. The rooms are decorated with flower arrangements, scattered with devotional objects. Mother and daughter cultivate their connection to the supernatural, either in the shape of a strict Catholicism or as small rituals in nature. In one scene Basia dances around a fire like a witch. She is also the one who repeatedly seeks contact with the outside world. We see her with a mobile phone then, but the person at the other end remains intangible, unable or unwilling to break the spell around the mother-and-daughter team. It is a dense, almost deserted world which Karol Pałka in his debut film renders in gloomy, shadowed images that grow brighter only when spring comes. But even then, the dramatic opening piece “Specially for You” by the Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha still resonates.
Carolin Weidner

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Director
Karol Pałka
Script
Karol Pałka
Cinematographer
Karol Pałka
Editor
Katarzyna Boniecka
Producer
Karolina Mróz, Wojciech Marczewski
Co-Producer
National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute
Sound
Piotr Knop, Anna Rok
World Sales
Marcella Jelic
Winner of: Silver Dove (International Competition)
Animation Perspectives 2021
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Ceuta’s Gate
Randa Maroufi
A performative reconstruction sketches and condenses daily life at the border between the Spanish exclave of Ceuta and Morocco, which is crossed illegally by all kinds of goods.
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Ceuta’s Gate

Bab Septa
Randa Maroufi
Animation Perspectives 2021
Documentary Film
France,
Morocco
2019
19 minutes
Spanish,
Arabic
Subtitles: 
English

Everything seems neat at first in Randa Maroufi’s performative reconstruction. Cars form orderly queues; market women tie up their baggage. On the monotonous grey background, the scenes appear schematic, like a blueprint where suddenly everything becomes graphically condensed. Everyday life at the border between the Spanish exclave of Ceuta and Morocco, which is crossed illegally by all kinds of goods.

André Eckardt

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Director
Randa Maroufi
Script
Randa Maroufi
Cinematographer
Luca Coassin
Editor
Randa Maroufi, Ismael Joffroy Chandoutis
Producer
Saïd Hamich
Sound
Mohamed Bounouar, Léonore Mercier
Animation Perspectives 2021
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Collapsing Mies
Claudia Larcher
Mies van der Rohe, the architect of transparency: Here his building elements rotate, multiply and are superimposed on each other until the dizzying compression supplants the enclosed space.
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Collapsing Mies

Collapsing Mies
Claudia Larcher
Animation Perspectives 2021
Experimental Film
Austria
2019
7 minutes
without dialogue

Mies van der Rohe revolutionized architecture with his radically reduced formal language of clear lines and transparency. Claudia Larcher pieces together his building elements – frames, columns, banisters –, makes them rotate around their vertical axes, multiplies and superimposes them until a dizzying compression is achieved which supplants the enclosed space and thus transparency.

André Eckardt

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Director
Claudia Larcher
Script
Claudia Larcher
Producer
Claudia Larcher
Score
Alexander J. Eberhard
World Sales
sixpackfilm
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Conversations with Siro

Conversations avec Siro
Dima El-Horr
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Lebanon,
France
2021
52 minutes
Arabic,
French
Subtitles: 
French, English

Lebanese filmmaker Dima El-Horr moved to Paris several years ago. Among the friends who stayed at home is the artist Sirvat Fazlian, whom she regularly visits in Beirut until the failed revolution of 2019, the COVID lockdown, the devastating port explosion and finally the dramatic economic crisis put a temporary end to their meetings. So the director decides to give her conversations with Siro a cinematic form.

Ever since the death of her husband, the well-known Armenian actor Berj Fazlian, Siro has lived alone in a flat filled with souvenirs and devoted most of her time to music and painting. In this film, footage from the years before 2019 blends with recorded phone calls between Siro and Dima and recent scenes from Paris, coming together in a densely woven portrait of life in exile. While snow falls in Paris, Siro talks about warm days on the Mediterranean coast and sings Armenian songs. She rails against the permanent crisis in Lebanon, but her nature is not affected. For one thing, Siro personifies the legendary Lebanese resilience. Yet for the filmmaker she represents that part of the heart that people in exile leave behind. So almost inevitably, “Conversations with Siro” becomes the director’s dialogue with herself.
Christoph Terhechte

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Dima El-Horr
Cinematographer
Dima El-Horr
Editor
Catherine Zins
Producer
Paul Rognoni, Sabine Sidawi
Sound
Jean-Pierre Dussardier
Nominated for: FIPRESCI Prize, Prize of the Interreligious Jury
Animation and Musique concrète 2021
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Court-circuit n° 180 – Interview with Michèle Bokanowski
Lorenzo Recio
Michèle Bokanowski’s sounds have been a distinct part of Patrick Bokanowski’s film images since 1972. Between tape loops she talks about her work with material that’s often quite unlike music.
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Court-circuit n° 180 – Interview with Michèle Bokanowski

Court-circuit n° 180 – Interview de Michèle Bokanowski
Lorenzo Recio
Animation and Musique concrète 2021
Documentary Film
France
2004
10 minutes
French
Subtitles: 
English

Michèle Bokanowski’s sounds have been a distinct part of Patrick Bokanowski’s film images since 1972. The origin of her soundtracks often lies in noises that are quite unlike music. Thus, she uses the clacking of billiard balls to describe people working on a field in the distance. Between tape loops and electronic devices, the composer talks about her craft of shaping sonorous material.

André Eckardt

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Director
Lorenzo Recio
Producer
ARTE France, MK2TV
International Competition Short Film 2021
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Crumbs of Life
Katarzyna Miechowicz
This wild, imaginative thriller in analogue cut-out technique – in the best Polish animation film tradition of the Łódź Film School – offers plenty of room for interpretation.
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Crumbs of Life

Okruszki życia
Katarzyna Miechowicz
International Competition Short Film 2021
Animated Film
Poland
2020
7 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

Spitting ponies, a cursed TV reporter and a hairy giant who is lovingly combed by his brunette girlfriend while she develops inexplicable fears about her own foot. This will later literally be shot off – the foot, not the boyfriend! A faceless man is also there – acting in alliance with the ponies. This colourful, ominous animated thriller made in analogue cut-out technique addresses states of anxiety, masochistic fights and media criticism. Perhaps.

Borjana Gaković

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Director
Katarzyna Miechowicz
Script
Katarzyna Miechowicz
Cinematographer
Katarzyna Miechowicz
Editor
Piotr Baryła
Producer
Agata Golanska
Sound
Piotr Baryła
Score
Anna Obara
Animation
Katarzyna Miechowicz
World Sales
Maciej Reguła
Retrospective 2021
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The Empty House
Miriam Pfeiffer
After reunification the Israelite Religious Community Leipzig grows – and needs room. But their new residence remains empty for the time being: neighbouring land owners sue.
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The Empty House

Das leere Haus
Miriam Pfeiffer
Retrospective 2021
Documentary Film
Germany
2004
30 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None

After reunification, immigration made the Israelite Religious Community of Leipzig grow to considerable size, too big for its old rooms. The Ariowitsch House, built in the 1920s as an Israelite old people’s home, is to become the home of a generously dimensioned cultural and community centre – and at the same time commemorate the residents of the home who were deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. But the start of the development is delayed: neighbouring land owners file a lawsuit. Miriam Pfeiffer intervenes in the ongoing public debate, asking citizens of the city about their suspicions concerning reasons of the refusal that the competent court may not be aware of.

Sylvia Görke

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Director
Miriam Pfeiffer
Cinematographer
Miriam Pfeiffer, Alexandra Czok
Editor
Maurice Hünsni
Producer
Schulmuseum Leipzig
Sound
Anja Hempel, Gert Blumhagen
Score
Chor der Israelitischen Religionsgemeinschaft zu Leipzig
Matinee Saxon State Archive 2021
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The Memorial
K. Kayser, B. Schmidt, K. Coccejus
Conveyed by innovative music and original sound bites, a disturbing dialogue between a memorial to National Socialist crimes and its viewers evolves.
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The Memorial

Das Mahnmal
K. Kayser, B. Schmidt, K. Coccejus
Matinee Saxon State Archive 2021
Documentary Film
GDR
1975
10 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None

An innovative approach to the subject of National Socialism which uses a composition by Georg Katzer, a GDR pioneer of Neue Musik. The sound level – acoustic distortions and sound bites by leading representatives of the Third Reich – dominates, juxtaposed with minimalist images. A dialogue between viewers and memorial evolves in shots and counter shots.

Konstantin Wiesinger

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Director
K. Kayser, B. Schmidt, K. Coccejus
Producer
Amateurfilmstudio Fernsehsender Schwerin