Film Archive

Audience Award Competition 2020
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Faith and Branko
Catherine Harte
Faith loves music and Branko loves Faith. The two set out on a turbulent journey as a music duo and married couple. But alas, the first cracks in their romantic bliss soon appear.
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Faith and Branko

Faith and Branko
Catherine Harte
Competition for the Audience Award 2020
Documentary Film
Serbia,
UK
2020
82 minutes
English,
Serbian
Subtitles: 
English

It begins like a classic “girl meets boy” story: Faith, a charismatic accordion player from Great Britain, travels to Serbia to learn about Roma folk music. She meets the violinist Branko, who is instantly smitten. They quickly marry and form a band. But with musical success their love dwindles. A turbulent story of expectations, disappointments and the dream of happiness.

Faith enters into Branko’s life in an almost disturbingly casual way. She doesn’t seem to be bothered by the new country, the sceptical family and the cultural differences. Branko on the other hand adores his new wife and boldly enters a new world. They are a big hit as a duo – travelling around the world and playing bigger and bigger venues. But while Faith feels as happy as a lark, Branko seems like an uprooted tree. Instead of dealing with their differences they keep moving on rapidly, until one ruthless step follows the next. Catherine Harte has produced a captivating and very intimate portrait of this contradictory couple. Relentlessly close and yet compassionate, the film develops an impressive pull you don’t want to resist.
Kim Busch

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Catherine Harte
Cinematographer
Catherine Harte
Editor
Dragan Von Petrovic, Ljubodrag Starovlah
Producer
Snezana Van Houwelingen, Catherine Harte
Sound
Zoran Maksimovic
Funder
Film Center Serbia
Filmstill Families’ Albums

Families’ Albums

Albums de familles
Moïa Jobin-Paré
International Competition Animated Film 2023
Animated Film
Canada
2023
8 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

Images of blurred landscapes fade into each other. Apparent rock formations reveal themselves only at second glance as collages of human body parts. Browsing further through the family album uncovers something that is rather rarely found in such private pictorial chronicles: the backs of people’s heads. Grandparents, aunts and friends do not, as usual, look out of the album and the then at the viewer in the now but into the mysterious depths of a neon-lighted corridor. Its architectural elements form a filmic labyrinth behind whose closed doors animated collages of arms and hands perform everyday gestures in a ghost-like pantomime.

Moïa Jobin-Paré opens found private photo albums. The connections and stories between the pictures remain as abstract as that which the photographs show is concrete. Poetic spaces of interpretation open up. The Canadian artist offers a special reading. She scrapes individual elements or patterns off the analogue photographs and animates these “painterly” edits in a space of washed-out sounds. Scratches and white dots spread mushroom-like on the physically dissolving images.

André Eckardt

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Moïa Jobin-Paré
Script
Moïa Jobin-Paré
Cinematographer
Moïa Jobin-Paré
Editor
Moïa Jobin-Paré
Producer
Moïa Jobin-Paré
Sound
Moïa Jobin-Paré
Sound Design
Moïa Jobin-Paré
Animation
Moïa Jobin-Paré
World Sales
Serge Abiaad
Nominated for: mephisto 97.6 Audience Award
Slowenian Animation 2022
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Far East Film Festival Trailer 2009
Špela Čadež
The Far East Film Festival in Udine is dedicated to popular Asian films. Špela Čadež’s trailer for its 11th festival edition is dedicated to the love of noodles that unites nations.
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Far East Film Festival Trailer 2009

Far East Film Festival Trailer 2009
Špela Čadež
Slowenian Animation 2022
Animated Film
Italy,
Slovenia
2009
1 minute
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

Since 1999, the Far East Film Festival, the biggest festival of popular Asian films in Europe, has been held annually in the Italian city of Udine. Špela Čadež was commissioned to design the trailer for its 11th edition in 2009 and delivered a crisp and short, wonderfully incisive puppet animation about the love of noodles – with or without cheese – that unites cultures and continent.

Lina Dinkla

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Špela Čadež
Script
Špela Čadež
Producer
Far East Film Festival (FEFF)
Sound
Johanna Herr
Animation
Špela Čadež
Slowenian Animation 2022
Filmstill Farewell
Farewell
Leon Vidmar
Lovro steps into the bathtub. A drop falls from the faucet and makes waves – into the past, back to the day he went fishing with his grandfather for the first time.
Filmstill Farewell

Farewell

Slovo
Leon Vidmar
Slowenian Animation 2022
Animated Film
Slovenia
2016
6 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

Lovro steps into the bathtub. A drop falls from the faucet and makes waves – into the past, back to the day he went fishing with his grandfather for the first time. Thoughts, sounds, bath utensils swirl memory and reality together … With this animated melancholia, Leon Vidmar, a student of Špela Čadež, continues in the vein of his teacher’s works in terms of craft and atmosphere.

Lina Dinkla

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Leon Vidmar
Script
Jerneja Kaja Balog
Cinematographer
Miloš Srdić
Editor
Leon Vidmar, Teo Rižnar
Producer
Kolja Saksida
Sound Design
Julij Zornik
Score
Tomaž Grom
Animation
Leon Vidmar, Jaka Kramberger
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Father

Ye ye he fu qin
Wei Deng
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
China
2020
97 minutes
Chinese
Subtitles: 
English

“After I die, show your film at my funeral!” Zuogui, the director’s grandfather, is 86 years old and has been blind since childhood. Becoming a fortune teller was a way out of poverty for him. People are still coming to him for advice, including his son Donggu, a developer: “Dad, how is my fortune next year?” In his portrait of generations about his father and grandfather, Wei Deng depicts tradition and change, violence and alienation in Chinese society.

Pale greys and dim lights create an atmosphere that seems to correspond to the dark memories of famine, dead siblings and the violently enforced one-child policy. The camera stays close to the grandfather as he feels his way along the walls of his flat. Orienting himself in his own environment has become harder since Donggu had the old house torn down and a new one built. Zuogui has little use for the modern China that claims to stand for economic boom and prosperity. Only when another of his son’s developments, which the fortune teller had warned against, threatens to fail does affection between the two seem possible again.
Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Wei Deng
Cinematographer
Wei Deng
Editor
Wei Deng
Producer
Wei Deng
Nominated for: FIPRESCI Prize, Prize of the Interreligious Jury
Winner of: Golden Dove (International Competition)
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Fati’s Choice

Le choix de Fati
Fatimah Dadzie
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Ghana,
South Africa
2021
45 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
English

A beach reminds us of Fati’s recent past. She came to Italy by sea, without papers, pregnant for the fifth time. Longing for her children, she returned to Ghana six months later – without her husband. The people around her can’t understand this decision. “You’ve created a mess,” a friend says. “How do I tell people?” a sister asks. But Fati wants to provide for her family, even though she still has to liberate three of her children from the custody of her in-laws.

Numerous recent documentaries have been dedicated to the experiences of people who arrive in the EU and get caught in the degrading conditions of asylum politics, but this work by Ghanaian director Fatimah Dadzie offers a change of perspective. In Fati’s hometown, Europe is considered a paradise – and what fool would voluntarily run away from there? The decision has lost the returnee all prestige. Her social exclusion is shown here by relatives as talking heads, directly in front of the camera. But when the film overlays everyday images of care work or street hawking with Fati’s voiceover, it gives a voice to its steadfast protagonist.
Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Fatimah Dadzie
Script
Fatimah Dadzie
Cinematographer
Yao Ladzekpo
Editor
Gloria Adotevi
Producer
Don Edkins, Tiny Mungwe
Co-Producer
Hamid Yakub
Sound
Kofi Sefa
Score
Tito Marshall Gomez
World Sales
Bérénice Hahn
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Favorite Daughter

Favorite Daughter
Dana Reilly
International Competition Short Film 2022
Documentary Film
USA
2022
20 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

Take: three generations of women in Covid lockdown in New York, enough white wine, vodka and time to talk about the really important issues. Dana Reilly makes the best of the pandemic restrictions and films what happens when her mother Janet and 90-year-old grandmother Sylvia decide to move in together. The result is a funny and at the same time lovingly raw tribute to two strong personalities, their not uncomplicated closeness and completely different worlds.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Dana Reilly
Cinematographer
Dana Reilly, Janet Isa
Editor
Keith Maitland
Producer
Dana Reilly
Sound
Dana Reilly
Score
Maya Dunietz
Camera Lucida 2023
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Feet in Water, Head on Fire
Terra Long
In southern California, date palms from the Middle East grow, tales from One Thousand and One Nights are told and a volcanic eruption is expected. A document of enchanting simultaneity.
Filmstill Feet in Water, Head on Fire

Feet in Water, Head on Fire

Feet in Water, Head on Fire
Terra Long
Camera Lucida 2023
Documentary Film
USA,
Canada
2023
90 minutes
Spanish,
English
Subtitles: 
English

Not a single cloud ever seems to drift across this sky, the sun never ceases to send its powerful rays down. Here, in southern California, where the San Andreas Fault has created an unmistakable topography and invisible water currents run under the barren soil, date palms thrive best: feet in water, head on fire. Terra Long has looked around, traced the history of the plants which originally came to North America from the Middle East, and visited the parades and festivities dedicated to the sugary fruit. Layer by layer, she constructs her very own perspective on the landscape and the people, translates her haptic impressions into magnificent 16mm shots and designs a complex soundtrack.

Long manages to join the past and present and produce a concise, quasi sensual extract. The laborious manual pollination of the date palms plays a role in it, as do the collapsed ecosystem of the Salton Sea, archived dresses of Arabian Nights beauty queens and interviews that testify only to what is now historical; as do elderly white couples floating in their pools and walking across the lawns of golf courses. “Feet in Water, Head on Fire” is a document of simultaneity that captivates from the first minute to the last.

Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Terra Long
Cinematographer
Terra Long
Editor
Kaija Siirala, Terra Long
Producer
Terra Long, Mireya Martinez, Sharlene Bamboat
Sound Design
Richy Carey
Re-Visions 2020
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Ferment
Tim Macmillan
An old man and his granddaughter are sitting in a quiet square in the middle of the city. Suddenly he has a heart attack, falls to the ground – and time freezes.
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Ferment

Ferment
Tim Macmillan
Re-Visions 2020
Animated Film
UK
1999
5 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

An old man and his granddaughter are sitting in a quiet square in the middle of the city. Suddenly he has a heart attack, falls to the ground – and time freezes. This could be the famous second where you see your life flash before your inner eye. But in which direction is it moving? Forward into the past, backward into the future or sideways into the now?

Ralph Eue

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Tim Macmillan
Script
Tim Macmillan
Cinematographer
Tim Macmillan
Editor
Malcolm Macmillan
Producer
Grace Kitto
Sound
Soma
Animation
Tim Macmillan
World Sales
LUX Distribution
Production Company
LUX Distribution
Kids DOK 2020
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Fien, Jip & Fien
Marie De Hert, Ellen Pollard
Jip sends his crush many hearts via smartphone from his holidays. But what is that thing, love? Together with his sister he is looking for answers in this sun-drenched summer.
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Fien, Jip & Fien

Fien, Jip & Fien
Marie De Hert, Ellen Pollard
Kids DOK 2020
Documentary Film
Belgium
2020
15 minutes
Dutch
Subtitles: 
German

The siblings Fien and Jip are on summer holidays. They sit laughing in a pedal boat, sunbathe giggling on a meadow, and talk about a great unknown: love. For Jip is extremely busy sending his crush many hearts via smartphone. But who can provide information about this exciting feeling? Fien thinks: “Love is like ice cream with chocolate sprinkles on top.”

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Marie De Hert, Ellen Pollard
Cinematographer
Ellen Pollard
Producer
Maarten Schmidt
Re-Visions 2020
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Fight da faida
Vincenzo Gioanola
A garishly colourful political rap video from Italy. Politics, business and daily life are poisoned by the influence of Mafia and Camorra. Fight da faida! Fight blood vengeance!
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Fight da faida

Fight da faida
Vincenzo Gioanola
Re-Visions 2020
Animated Film
Italy
1995
5 minutes
Italian
Subtitles: 
None

A garishly coloured and driving video for a 1992 single by the Italian rapper Frankie hi-nrg mc. It’s about how the Mafia and Camorra poison politics, business and everyday life. This incandescent complaint from a “civil war” turns into an appeal: immunize yourself against the seductions of a deathly lifestyle! Fight da faida: Fight the apparent inevitability of blood vengeance!

Ralph Eue

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Vincenzo Gioanola
Producer
Vincenzo Gioanola
Animation
Vincenzo Gioanola
Animation and Musique concrète 2021
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Five Film Exercises – Film 1
John Whitney, James Whitney
An impact pendulum writes directly on the soundtrack of the film, producing analogue bleeps and bits. In alternating coloured light, shades change their shape.
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Five Film Exercises – Film 1

Five Film Exercises – Film 1
John Whitney, James Whitney
Animation and Musique concrète 2021
Experimental Film
USA
1943
5 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

The Whitney brothers are pioneers of abstract animation. In 1943/1944, they experimented in five film exercises with modernist form and a device of their own that wrote directly on the soundtrack of the film by means of an impact pendulum. The resulting analogue electronic bleeps and bits are accompanied by moving stencils in constantly alternating coloured backlight whose shadows change their geometrical shape.

Cornelia Friederike Müller aka CFM

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
John Whitney, James Whitney
Dancing in the Dark 2022
Filmstill FKA twigs: How’s That
FKA twigs: How’s That
Jesse Kanda
A naked body: Its skin envelope spreads and longs to be touched. The music asks what lust feels like and is answered by enchanting computer-generated images.
Filmstill FKA twigs: How’s That

FKA twigs: How’s That

FKA twigs: How’s That
Jesse Kanda
Dancing in the Dark 2022
Animated Film
UK
2013
4 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

A naked body liquifies and becomes weightless. What’s left is its skin envelope which expands endlessly, longing for the tiniest touch. The increasingly shapeless figure vibrates in colours, fragments flashing, until the video track fails. The sensual piece by FKA twigs asks in slow motion what lust feels like. Jesse Kanda answers with enchanting computer-generated images.

André Eckardt

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jesse Kanda
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Flammes

Flammes
Patrick Bokanowski
Animation and Musique concrète 2021
Experimental Film
France
1998
4 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

Dark percussive sounds call forth anthropomorphic creatures. They come to life in short dance etudes. Optically manipulated, they stretch into gaunt shapes, unfold in a thousand layers like exotic animals, dissolve into abstract paintings. They are pure creatures of light: fleeting, immaterial. The rhythmic sound motif colours their movements with sometimes pithy, sometimes breathy variations.

André Eckardt

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Patrick Bokanowski
Script
Patrick Bokanowski
Cinematographer
Daniel Borenstein
Editor
Eric Castera, Patrick Bokanowski
Producer
Patrick Bokanowski
Score
Michèle Bokanowski
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Flee

Flugt
Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Competition for the Audience Award 2021
Documentary Film
Denmark,
France,
Sweden,
Norway
2021
86 minutes
Danish,
Dari,
Russian,
English
Subtitles: 
English

For many years, Amin was unable to speak about the experience of his flight. It is only now that he finds the courage to open up to his schoolmate, filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen. From earliest childhood Amin’s life was marked by political unrest in his native country of Afghanistan and soon by growing up without a permanent home. His painful memories are visualized in haunting animations, interwoven with documentary footage.

It’s a well-known fact that flight does not lead from point A to point B and then simply ends. Amin’s story, though, shows how rocky and tortuous it can really be, leading from Afghanistan via Russia, Estonia and a few other stations to Denmark. Only when his life is on a safe track with an upcoming wedding and a good career does he find the strength to talk about what he had to go through to be where he is today. In an almost psychoanalytical setting, the protagonist – lying down – talks about his past. The narrative moves in a spiral between then and now, allowing for frequent respites between the traumatic impressions that the poignant animation makes almost physically tangible. It’s no coincidence that “Flee” has already won multiple awards and is considered an “instant classic” even now.
Kim Busch

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Script
Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Amin
Editor
Janus Billeskov Jansen
Producer
Monica Hellström, Charlotte De La Gournerie, Signe Byrge Sørensen
Score
Uno Helmerson
Animation
Kenneth Ladekjær
World Sales
Shoshi Korman
Dancing in the Dark 2022
Filmstill Floralia II
Floralia II
Sabrina Ratté
From the pictorial concept of the floral still life to a 3D archive for extinct plants: Floral sculptures add a new dimension to representation. But life? Stays still.
Filmstill Floralia II

Floralia II

Floralia II
Sabrina Ratté
Dancing in the Dark 2022
Experimental Film
Canada
2021
4 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

Ratté develops the pictorial concept of the floral still life into a new kind of illusionary space. The fragmented floral sculptures, created by 3D scans, design a speculative future in which extinct plants are preserved in a weightless archive. The representation gains a dimension but does not become more than a surface mould with no informative value about the living core.

Robert Seidel

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Sabrina Ratté
Producer
Sabrina Ratté
Sound Design
Andrea-Jane Cornell
Score
Sabrina Ratté