Film Archive

Matinee Saxon State Archive 2021
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… Do Not Forget Us! [excerpt]
Michael Wünsch, Christine Beer
At the district level, the SED’s legitimization and claim to moral leadership are brought into a line of tradition with the illegal KPD resistance in the Weimar Republic.
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… Do Not Forget Us! [excerpt]

… vergeßt uns nicht! [Ausschnitt]
Michael Wünsch, Christine Beer
Matinee Saxon State Archive 2021
Documentary Film
GDR
1984
15 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None

A film is ceremonially screened on the 40th anniversary of the murder of the resistance group around KPD (Communist Party of Germany) functionary Georg Schuman. Present is Horst Schumann, son of the resistance fighter and 1st Secretary of the SED Leipzig District Authority. The filmed document and the documented screening become propaganda accomplices: The GDR present perpetuates the history of NS resistance.

Konstantin Wiesinger

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Director
Michael Wünsch, Christine Beer
Script
Michael Wünsch, Christine Beer
Cinematographer
Maro Nagel, Thomas Huschlo, Bert Gahrmann, Thomas Voßbeck, Janek Ziegler, Hagen Reckziegel, Rainhardt Mißbach, Thomas Böttger
Editor
Christine Beer, Gabi Blumentritt
Producer
Filmstudio am Haus der Jungen Pioniere "Georg Schwarz", Leipzig
Sound
Thilo Kersten, Benedikt Rösel, Janek Ziegler
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0.2 Milligrams of Gold

0,2 miligramas de ouro
Diego Quinderé de Carvalho
Competition for the Audience Award Short Film 2021
Documentary Film
Belgium,
Brazil,
Portugal,
Hungary
2021
24 minutes
Portuguese (Brazil),
French,
English
Subtitles: 
English

8,500 kilometres lie between the Amazon and the Ardennes. In his home country of Brazil, Diego Quinderé de Carvalho only looks at the inaccessible and menacing forest from the outside. Its Belgian counter piece, however, is easy to explore. Here, everything is laid out by people, neatly ordered and reduced to the essentials. A geologist, a gold miner and an astronomer provide insights for a philosophical exploration of the origin of existence and the future of our planet.

Kim Busch

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Director
Diego Quinderé de Carvalho
Script
Diego Quinderé de Carvalho
Cinematographer
Leo Foulet
Editor
Diego Quinderé de Carvalho
Producer
Frederik Nicolai
Co-Producer
André Mielnik, Diego Quinderé de Carvalho
Sound
Sébastien Lheureux
Score
Sébastien Lheureux
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75/1

75/1
Till Kleinau
German Competition Short Film 2021
Documentary Film
Germany
2020
27 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English

“Boo” – the name is as unusual as the sound is special. The avant-garde composer Harry Partch invented instruments for micro-sounds and completely new musical experiences. The musician and instrument maker Thomas Meixner dedicated two years of his life, marked by family and health losses, to rebuilding 75 of these sound-generators for a concert tour. The film portrays a monomaniac who fiercely avoids social life but with great sensitivity makes material sing.

André Eckardt

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Director
Till Kleinau
Cinematographer
Katja Tauber, Christophe Poulles
Editor
Friederike Dörffler
Producer
Friederike Dörffler
Sound
Maximilian Rodegra
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98 kg

98 kg
Izabela Plucińska
Competition for the Audience Award Short Film 2021
Animated Film
Germany,
Poland
2021
5 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

The cycle of domestic violence: tension, escalation, remorse, and then all over again. The woman in Izabela Plucińska’s film shares the fate of many sufferers: She can’t manage to break out. The metaphorical dumbbells she would have to lift to do it weigh 98 kilograms – like the man who does this to her. All she can do is dissolve, disappear and breathe silently into her individual parts. The animations keep erasing themselves, but painful marks are left behind.

Kim Busch

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Izabela Plucińska
Editor
Daniela Kinateder
Producer
Paulina Ratajczak, Izabela Plucińska
Sound
Andrea Martignoni
Score
Andrea Martignoni
Animation
Izabela Plucińska
World Sales
Maciej Reguła
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A Bay

Uma baía
Murilo Salles
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Brazil
2021
109 minutes
Portuguese (Brazil)
Subtitles: 
English

The Baía de Guanabara is not just any bay: the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro has sprawled around it. Its waste water threatens the rich ecosystem, planes roar along the approach corridors above. These filmic explorations on the margins of the megacity portray various environments that are all connected to the bay in a specific way. The people here are micro-wage earners making a modest living.

At night the lights of the city and the promises of capitalism shine in the distance. To the people living at the periphery, they seem out of reach. In eight chapters this documentary essay meditates on their habitats along the bay, following the repetitive and physically exhausting activities of humans and farm animals. Unusual perspectives, careful camera work and a poignant sound design elevate these observations to a commentary on the crisis in Brazil. Murilo Salles, who won a Silver Dove in Leipzig in 1978 for his debut “These Are the Weapons”, sheds light on the close link between geographical space and social inequality.
Annina Wettstein

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Director
Murilo Salles
Script
Murilo Salles, Eva Randolph, Itauana Coquet
Cinematographer
Léo Bittencourt, Fabrício Mota
Editor
Eva Randolph
Producer
Murilo Salles
Sound
Felipe Luz
Score
João Jabace, Sarah Lelièvre
Nominated for: FIPRESCI Prize, Prize of the Interreligious Jury
International Competition 2021
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A Custom of the Sea
Fabrizio Polpettini
Three friends explore the radiance of the Mediterranean, which connects Christian and Islamic countries and has always been and still is a site of conflicts.
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A Custom of the Sea

Un usage de la mer
Fabrizio Polpettini
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
France
2021
52 minutes
Arabic,
English,
French,
Italian
Subtitles: 
English, German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing

Porto Maurizio, where the director, who lives in France today, grew up, is located on the Ligurian coast. The village is the starting point for a cinematic journey into the past that spans a surprisingly wide arc to a time when Muslim pirates, the corsairs, haunted the Mediterranean and took Europeans as slaves. To this end, the film light-handedly draws from the rich fund of film history and its iconography.

Adventure films from the 1940s and historical murals depict the naval battles of the early 19th century in powerful images. The director ingeniously combines such visual finds with analogue new recordings of a journey with two friends. Their seemingly loosely told anecdotes and chance encounters combine to form a coherent whole, forming a geopolitical system of coordinates around the Mediterranean that deals with eurocentrism, colonial history and religiously motivated conflicts between Christian and Islamic countries. The subjects couldn’t be more topical.
Annina Wettstein

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Director
Fabrizio Polpettini
Cinematographer
Valentina Provini
Editor
Marylou Vergès
Producer
Fabrizio Polpettini
Co-Producer
Pierre-André Belin
Animation and Musique concrète 2021
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A Man and His Dog Out for Air
Robert Breer
Birdsong and meandering lines, sometimes solo, sometimes as a swarm movement. A park landscape, a staircase, and a man with a dog emerge fleetingly from the permanently changing forms.
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A Man and His Dog Out for Air

A Man and His Dog Out for Air
Robert Breer
Animation and Musique concrète 2021
Animated Film
USA
1957
2 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

Birdsong and meandering lines, sometimes solo, sometimes as a swarm movement. In their midst a park landscape, a staircase, and a man with a dog seem to emerge fleetingly. In Robert Breer’s minimalist drawn animation, the abstract and the figurative briefly overlap, then fall apart again. The permanent change of the forms follows the pulse rate of the birdsong recorded in nature.

André Eckardt

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Director
Robert Breer
Editor
Robert Breer
Sound
Frannie Breer
Animation
Robert Breer
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A Million

A Million
Arata Mori
Camera Lucida – Out of Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Japan,
Germany
2021
65 minutes
Japanese
Subtitles: 
English

The account of a journey through an imaginary city, filmed along China’s new trade routes. Like the fictionalized Marco Polo from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, the traveller in this film talks of worlds that resemble familiar places but follow their own, sometimes seemingly incredible rules. The observations condense into a meditation about the nature of cities and the transformation of the concept of globalization.

The foreign visitor’s voice sounds muffled, as if it were coming out of the cave whose interior views open the film. Time and again, the eye returns there – but the fluorescent rock faces soon turn into the sparkle of distant galaxies, the narrow confines of the cave indistinguishable from the vastness of space. It is a symbol of the decoupling of sign and meaning, of “real” and “false”, of sensual impressions and their positive geographical allocation that pervades the film: Daft Punk perform in front of a Chinese shopping mall; the Eiffel Tower stands first in a housing estate, then, folded up to a fraction of its size, in view of Big Ben and Tower Bridge.
Felix Mende

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Arata Mori
Cinematographer
Arata Mori
Editor
Arata Mori
Producer
Arata Mori
Co-Producer
Andreas Hartmann, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
Sound
Philippe Ciompi
Score
Yu Miyashita
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A Night of Knowing Nothing

A Night of Knowing Nothing
Payal Kapadia
Camera Lucida – Out of Competition 2021
Documentary Film
France,
India
2021
96 minutes
Hindi,
Bengali
Subtitles: 
English

Riots and protests at an Indian film school, told in letters written by student L to her lover K, in which she reflects on what’s happening around her. While government forces gradually push back the rebellion, L realizes that she will never receive an answer because K belongs to a higher caste. The anonymous lines are wistful echoes of a love tragedy in times of the resurgence of a nationalistic class society.

Director Payal Kapadia steeps the visual material, compiled from a variety of sources and testifying to long, draining nights of protest, but also to great determination and a youthful exuberance, almost consistently in grainy black and white. Even mobile phone or surveillance camera footage are thus aesthetically related to 16mm student films from past decades. But against this contrast the immediate, unfinished nature of what is shown becomes all the more apparent, referencing the complex dialogue between a fragile memory and a tumultuous present that goes on in the film. A present in which questions of artistic representation, but also of personal responsibility, must be renegotiated.
Felix Mende

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Director
Payal Kapadia
Script
Payal Kapadia, Himanshu Prajapati
Cinematographer
Ranabir Das
Editor
Ranabir Das
Producer
Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff, Ranabir Das
Sound
Moinak Bose, Romain Ozanne
World Sales
Wouter Jansen
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A Solar Dream

Un rêve solaire
Patrick Bokanowski
Animation and Musique concrète 2021
Animated Film
France
2016
63 minutes
French
Subtitles: 
English

Patrick Bokanowski subjects his own early cine film footage to a magical optical transformation. In the glistening drizzle of electronic sounds and the deep rumbling of drone waves by Michèle Bokanowski, light eruptions, sweeping colours and shadowy apparitions unfold while the original footage shines through. A diary of awake dreaming observation.

André Eckardt

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Director
Patrick Bokanowski
Script
Patrick Bokanowski
Cinematographer
Patrick Bokanowski
Editor
Patrick Bokanowski
Producer
Patrick Bokanowski
Score
Michèle Bokanowski
German Competition 2021
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A Sound of My Own
Rebecca Zehr
A visually and aurally outstanding film about the musician Marja Burchard, leader of the legendary band “Embryo”. An ode to hearing, experimentation and inspiration.
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A Sound of My Own

A Sound of My Own
Rebecca Zehr
German Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Germany
2021
52 minutes
English,
German
Subtitles: 
English

She first appeared on stage at the age of eleven with the legendary Krautrock band “Embryo”. Her father, Christian Burchard, founded the band in 1969 and led it until 2016. Today – in her mid-thirties – Marja Burchard is the bandleader in this project, which has become a kind of family for her. But what seems so simple and organic is far from self-evident in an extremely male-dominated sphere, as Rebecca Zehr shows in her precisely observed and designed film.

This strictly and yet lightly composed melange mixes archival footage, psychedelic animation sequences and everyday observations of the normal life of a female musician between organisation and inspiration. With the visual level restricted to black and white and thus deliberately restrained, all the more attention is focused at the sound. The – who wonders? – outstanding score never takes the music for granted but works robustly with our perception. It’s the lucid, calm images and the narrative that is always anchored in the here and now that let this film stay incredibly haptic despite its concentration on our sense of hearing. Rebecca Zehr is not interested in portraying a musical legend, but in showing us what it could look and feel like to not only make music but live in it.
Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Rebecca Zehr
Cinematographer
Felix Press
Editor
Melanie Jilg
Producer
Rebecca Zehr, Katharina Rabl, University of Television and Film Munich (HFF)
Sound
Rebecca Zehr
Score
Marja Burchard
World Sales
Tina Janker
Winner of: Golden Dove (German Competition)
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Abandoned Village

Mitovebuli sofeli
Mariam Kapanadze
International Competition Short Film 2021
Animated Film
Georgia
2020
14 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

At first there’s nothing but clouds. A cock crows, sheep bells ring, a herd of cows begins to move. The sounds seem to come from another age. When the morning mist clears, we recognize the outlines of an abandoned village. Decayed huts, broken fences, crooked roofs. The film looks like an oil painting, a still life painted in sometimes delicate, sometimes broad brushstrokes, bathed in different lights with the shifting times of day and changing its mood.

Anke Leweke

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Director
Mariam Kapanadze
Editor
Elene Murjikneli
Producer
Mariam Kandelaki, Tsotne Kalandadze
Sound
Beso Kacharava
Animation
Elene Murjikneli
Creative Producer
Gela Kandelaki
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Abyssal

Abisal
Alejandro Alonso
International Competition Short Film 2021
Documentary Film
Cuba,
France
2021
30 minutes
Spanish
Subtitles: 
French, English

A ship scrapyard in western Cuba. The observing camera follows Raudel and his colleagues who work in what seems like a hermetically sealed microcosm. A homing pigeon strays into the place; the workers contemplate it silently as they smoke. Sometimes they talk about their dreams. Shots are focussed in turns on their bodies and their surroundings. Rhythmic, artfully crafted and authentically produced sounds accompany precise and lucid images, without aestheticizing the harshness of their work.

Borjana Gaković

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Director
Alejandro Alonso
Script
Lisandra López Fabé, Alejandro Alonso
Cinematographer
Alejandro Alonso
Editor
Emmanuel Peña
Producer
Boris Prieto, Alejandro Alonso, Oderay Ponce de León
Sound
Glenda Martínez Cabrera, Velia Díaz de Villalvilla, Alejandro Pérez
Score
Pepe Gavilondo
World Sales
Boris Prieto
Funder
Norwegian Fund for Cuban Cinema, CNC / Aide aux cinémas du monde
Winner of: Golden Dove Short Documentary (International Competition Short Film)
Kids DOK 2021
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Monkey Domino
Ulf Grenzer
A day at the zoo. An orangutan and a girl have fun fooling around. Until the father’s business dealings trigger a chain of events that changes everything.
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Monkey Domino

Affendomino
Ulf Grenzer
Kids DOK 2021
Animated Film
Germany
2021
4 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English

A day at the zoo, the orangutan sits in his cage and dreams of his life in the jungle when a girl comes by and brightens his dull afternoon. Her father doesn’t notice anything because he is on his mobile and laptop all the time to do important business. So important that the orangutan has to intervene, and a chain of event changes everything.

Lina Dinkla

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Director
Ulf Grenzer
Script
Ulf Grenzer, Franka Sachse
Editor
Ulf Grenzer
Producer
Ulf Grenzer, Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF
Sound
Kevin Jahnel, Anna Magdalino
Score
Ephraim Peise
Animation
Ulf Grenzer
Narrator
Helene Lorenz, Boris Schwiebert
Retrospective 2021
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Operation J
Walter Heynowski
A polemical biographical research of Adenauer’s Chief of Staff of the Chancellery Globke: Nazi administrative lawyer, Eichmann confidant, accomplice to the racist declassification of Jews.
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Operation J

Aktion J
Walter Heynowski
Retrospective 2021
Documentary Film
GDR
1961
103 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None

Heynowski’s biographical research in the guise of an exposé film was part of a campaign coordinated by SED functionary Albert Norden to unmask the FRG as a fascist state. Documents and commentaries trace the career of Adenauer’s Chief of Staff of the Chancellery, Hans Globke, who had collaborated in the systematic marking and racist declassification of Jews as a Nazi administrative lawyer and Eichmann confidant. The facts had been on the table for some time, but acquired new propaganda value in view of the impending Eichmann trial. In 1961, “Operation J” was awarded a main prize at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week.

Sylvia Görke

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Director
Walter Heynowski
Script
Walter Heynowski
Cinematographer
Rolf Sperling
Editor
Bert Schultz
Producer
Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF)
Matinee Saxon State Archive 2021
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When the Anemones Bloomed
Kollektiv
A restrained and thoughtful look at the “Below Forest Death March” which leaves room for nuances: Concentration camp inmates leave carvings on the trees. The testimonies “grow over”.
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When the Anemones Bloomed

Als die Anemonen blühten
Kollektiv
Matinee Saxon State Archive 2021
Documentary Film
GDR
1983
7 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None

A formally sophisticated and thoughtful film about the “Below Forest Death March” memorial site: In the late spring of 1945, this wooded area near Wittstock became an improvised temporary camp for inmates of the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps. They eternalized themselves and their fate by carving on the trees. But what does “eternal” mean? The trees grow, change and renew their skin …

Konstantin Wiesinger

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Director
Kollektiv
Producer
Cine-Pentama-Studio "Hans Beimler" VEB Kombinat Lokomotivbau-Elektrotechnische-Werke Hennigsdorf