Film Archive

Animation Perspectives 2021
Media Name: d4d788af-4ca7-4dd9-baee-ffc535ded8a1.jpg
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.
Media Name: d4d788af-4ca7-4dd9-baee-ffc535ded8a1.jpg

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

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Claudia Larcher
Script
Claudia Larcher
Producer
Claudia Larcher
Score
Alexander J. Eberhard
World Sales
sixpackfilm
Animation Perspectives 2021
Media Name: 427962de-670b-403d-97b4-8570c3510b79.jpg
Dramatis Personae
Claudia Larcher
A real-life tropical holiday resort as a stage where staff and guests play their roles in tableaux vivants, hiding their faces behind carved emoji masks.
Media Name: 427962de-670b-403d-97b4-8570c3510b79.jpg

Dramatis Personae

Dramatis Personae
Claudia Larcher
Animation Perspectives 2021
Experimental Film
Austria
2019
4 minutes
without dialogue

A real-life tropical holiday resort becomes a stage where staff and guests play their roles in tableaux vivants. They hide their faces behind carved emoji masks that serve – in the digital world – to express emotions and rate things. The result is a superficial and at the same time subversive semi-reality of linguistic, social and cultural levels of (mis-)communication.

André Eckardt

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Claudia Larcher
Producer
Claudia Larcher
Media Name: 41a05371-c3c4-4759-b0ff-bb7056dba149.jpg

Erwin

Erwin
Jan Soldat
German Competition Short Film 2020
Documentary Film
Austria,
Germany
2020
16 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English

58-year-old Erwin introduces himself as “old but horny”. He has declared the mobile home in his front garden his favourite refuge, where he has everything he needs: a computer, a bed, a coffee machine. Two webcams link Erwin to other men who satisfy his carnal desires. In this tiny space, Jan Soldat comes close to him, of course. He learns of love affairs, as great as extinguished, of a complicated family web and worries about the future.

Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jan Soldat
Cinematographer
Jan Soldat
Editor
Jan Soldat
Producer
Jan Soldat
Winner of: Silver Dove (German Competition Short Film)
Audience Award Competition Short Film 2021
Media Name: db7691b0-2cf9-4eef-ac09-454d7cc3e6a4.jpg
There Is Exactely Enough Time
Virgil Widrich, Oskar Salomonowitz
The filmmaker’s son was killed in an accident. He was working on a flip book that his father finishes. The proximity of happiness and loss in the most succinct form.
Media Name: db7691b0-2cf9-4eef-ac09-454d7cc3e6a4.jpg

There Is Exactely Enough Time

Es ist genau genug Zeit
Virgil Widrich, Oskar Salomonowitz
Competition for the Audience Award Short Film 2021
Animated Film
Austria
2021
2 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English

A very short film, infinitely sad and at the same time mischievous and playful. The opening credits tell us the devastating news: The filmmaker’s son was killed in an accident and left behind an unfinished flip book. The father resumes work on it and continues drawing the superhero tale, creating an animated film between deep mourning and carefree children’s logic. Capturing the proximity of happiness and loss in the most succinct form.

Lina Dinkla

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Virgil Widrich, Oskar Salomonowitz
Script
Oskar Salomonowitz, Virgil Widrich
Cinematographer
Virgil Widrich
Editor
Virgil Widrich
Producer
Virgil Widrich
Sound
Siegfried Friedrich
Score
Siegfried Friedrich
Animation
Oskar Salomonowitz, Virgil Widrich
World Sales
Gerald Weber
Animation Perspectives 2021
Media Name: 41605e37-a98c-4978-b482-9cadf4165d08.jpg
Habitat, EP7 Paris
Claudia Larcher
An animated architectural collage on the façade of the Paris cultural restaurant EP7 invites us to an irritating game of deception of lines of sight, angles and geometries in the life of the city.
2019
Media Name: 41605e37-a98c-4978-b482-9cadf4165d08.jpg

Habitat, EP7 Paris

Habitat, EP7 Paris
Claudia Larcher
Animation Perspectives 2021
Documentary Film
Austria
2019
1 minute
without dialogue

The façade of the Paris cultural restaurant EP7 forms the presentation surface for an animated architectural collage. Staggered exterior views of buildings rotate. The game of deception of lines of sight, angles and geometries has an irritating effect. The spatial depths lure the eye into the supposed interior of the body behind the skin of the façade, which is at the same time the mirror of an urban architecture of restlessness.

André Eckardt

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Claudia Larcher
Script
Claudia Larcher
Cinematographer
Claudia Larcher
Editor
Claudia Larcher
Producer
Claudia Larcher
Sound
Claudia Larcher
Animation Perspectives 2021
Media Name: f8da920f-9c3f-4b6a-a9c3-ba6a336fe53c.jpg
Heim
Claudia Larcher
A home in the middle of the day, only the electrical appliances are whirring. The camera gaze glides through rooms unfolded by the editing and captures uncanny, bizarre moments.
Media Name: f8da920f-9c3f-4b6a-a9c3-ba6a336fe53c.jpg

Heim

Heim
Claudia Larcher
Animation Perspectives 2021
Experimental Film
Austria
2009
12 minutes
without dialogue

A home in the middle of the day, only the electrical appliances are whirring. The camera gaze glides through the rooms and floors which are unfolded and seamlessly joined by the editing. Small oddities proliferate in the bourgeois habitat: an unanswered doorbell, an open freezer emitting light. Normality, perhaps unintentionally, whispers something uncanny.

André Eckardt

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Claudia Larcher
Cinematographer
Claudia Larcher
Producer
Claudia Larcher
Sound
Claudia Larcher
Animation
Claudia Larcher
Filmstill Johnny & Me

Johnny & Me

Johnny & Me
Katrin Rothe
International Competition Animated Film 2023
Animated Film
Germany,
Switzerland,
Austria
2023
100 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English

As she visits an exhibition, a graphic designer is mesmerised by the photocollages of the anti-fascist John Heartfield, who became known as the “montage dada.” Stefanie falls through a vortex of paper and photo snippets into an old-fashioned looking studio. A pair of scissors – an analogue tool she herself hardly uses – attracts her attention. She begins to cut a figure out of cardboard, a miniature version of the artist who at once addresses her and explores his life and works with her. The studio turns out to be a living archive that ceaselessly produces documents and information about Johnny. The research gives Stefanie, stressed and disappointed by her job, new motivation, and the courage to choose a different path as a designer.

Both protagonists have the same profession and find themselves facing the same questions about the significance and recognition of their work. Both are struggling in their own way with frustration and fears, caused by the different social and political circumstances of their generations. The different elements of this animated documentary come together in a dialogic collage that reflects on the mission of art, its educative and critical power, and its potential to bring about changes in our society.

Franka Sachse

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Katrin Rothe
Script
Katrin Rothe
Cinematographer
Thomas Eirich-Schneider, Richard Marx, Manon Pichón
Editor
Hannes Starz
Producer
Gunter Hanfgarn, Andrea Ufer, Ralph Wieser, Sereina Gabathuler, Werner Schweizer
Co-Producer
Rolf Bergmann, Carolin Mayer, Gabriela Bloch Steinmann
Sound
Stephanie Stremler, Manuel Harder, Michael Hatzius, Dorothee Carls
Sound Design
Lukas Brandes
Score
Micha Kaplan, Thomas Mävers
Animation
Lydia Günther, Caroline Hamann, Tonina Matamalas, Anne-Sophie Raemy, Benjamin Swiczinsky
World Sales
Elina Kewitz
German Distributor
Joachim Kühn
Artistic Design
Amelie Couchet, Malte Stein, Lisa Neubauer, Wolf Matzl, Birgit Scholin, Rosanne Janssens, Jonatan Schwenk, Kerstin Zemp, Werner Kernebeck, Gyula Szabó, Cornelia Freche, Lisa Sinram, Theresa Grysczok, Mandy Müller, Melanie Hauff, Edoardo Pasquini, Cornelia Diomis
International Competition 2021
Media Name: b9dc290e-f7d4-472b-a214-66f2d60bfb8d.jpg
KRAI
Aleksey Lapin
A casting for a historical film is supposed to take place in a Russian village. It is the occasion for an affectionate, semi-fictional local portrait with a sense for the absurd.
Media Name: b9dc290e-f7d4-472b-a214-66f2d60bfb8d.jpg

KRAI

KRAI
Aleksey Lapin
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Austria
2021
123 minutes
English,
German,
Italian,
Russian
Subtitles: 
English

Russian-born director Aleksey Lapin travels back to his relatives’ home village near the Ukrainian border, where he himself used to spend every summer. The film crew introduce themselves at a specially organized musical event, claiming that they have come to cast a historical film that is to be set in the village. What follows is a charming, semi-fictional documentary by and with the village community.

The proposed film project is just a pretext, that’s obvious from the start. Nonetheless, the villagers are happy to take part. Inventively and with subtle irony, Lapin plays with the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Thus observed scenes unobtrusively merge into staged ones. He records marvellously absurdities, for example a tree being felled and laboriously put up somewhere else for the “shoot”, or broken-down cars fuelling the rumours of electromagnetism in the area. The cinematography in black and white is notable, full of references to classic Russian films, timeless and timely at the same time. Lapin’s feature-length debut is not only an affectionate local portrait with a sense for the absurd, but also a film about film: In a long dialogue by the river, two protagonists talk about cinema as an art form and how it is changing.
Annina Wettstein

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Aleksey Lapin
Script
Aleksey Lapin
Cinematographer
Adrian Campean
Editor
Sebastian Schreiner
Producer
Florian Brüning, Thomas Herberth
Sound
Jaroslaw Redkin, Yuriy Todorov, Lenja Gathmann
World Sales
Gerald Weber
Filmstill Loving in Between

Loving in Between

Loving in Between
Jyoti Mistry
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Austria,
South Africa
2023
18 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

“Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean – so get yourself a little loving in between.” This advice of the African-American civil rights activist and jazz poet Langston Hughes precedes Jyoti Mistry’s found footage storm of images and runs like a guiding line through the archive material, a panopticon of revelries: parties, boxing matches, visits to the beach and above all, time and again, testimonies of lived queer sexuality. Sometimes clandestine, sometimes quite public.

Mistry mirrors the uninhibitedness of her sources in the way she arranges them – not neatly staggered but boldly mixed. The associative editing often virtually leaps into the images, linking them with purple colour explosions and three-dimensional animations of shoals of fish. On the soundtrack, a spoken word performance joins multi-channel dubbed noises and countless variations of the jazz standard “Diga Diga Doo.” This is how the film wrests its testimonies from the past and returns them to their inherent liveliness and transgressive explosive power.

Felix Mende

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jyoti Mistry
Script
Jyoti Mistry, Napo Masheane, Kgafela oa Magogodi
Editor
Nikki Comninos
Producer
Florian Schattauer
Sound Design
Peter Cornell
Score
Nishlyn Ramanna
Animation
The Kinetic
World Sales
Gerald Weber
Filmstill Marine Target

Marine Target

Marine Target
Lukas Marxt
German Competition Short Film 2022
Documentary Film
Austria,
Germany
2022
10 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

Lukas Marxt’s fourth film about the Salton Sea in Southern California focuses on 1944/45, when about 150 dummies, replicas of the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were dropped there for ballistic tests. “Marine Target” measures the remains of the wooden target platforms from up close and high above. The disconcerting soundtrack to this fascinating filmic study is provided by a swelling adaptation of the Nigerian hit “Atomic Bomb” by William Onyeabor.

Christoph Terhechte

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Lukas Marxt
Cinematographer
Lukas Marxt
Editor
Lukas Marxt, Vanja Smiljanić
Producer
Lukas Marxt
Sound
Marcus Zilz
Score
Marcus Zilz
World Sales
Dietmar Schwärzler
International Competition 2022
Filmstill Matter Out of Place
Matter Out of Place
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
A monumental study on garbage as the shaper of landscapes and the people and machines it keeps busy: from the workings of a self-sustaining system.
Filmstill Matter Out of Place

Matter Out of Place

Matter Out of Place
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
International Competition 2022
Documentary Film
Austria
2022
105 minutes
Albanian,
Nepali,
Swiss German,
English
Subtitles: 
English

For his monumental study of displacement, Nikolaus Geyrhalter has travelled across continents, mapping a new kind of landscape that has become detached from geographical or climatic conditions under palm trees, on mountains, at rivers, in the snow. Washed up, blown in, piled up, caught or left somewhere – where once the forces of nature were at work, garbage now dominates the shape of things. It has even brought forth a new social type: the relocator.

As in all his films, Nikolaus Geyrhalter operates the camera himself. It stands still, often for minutes, as if it couldn’t believe what presents itself: plastic webs seemingly grown together with the scrawny branches on embankments, decaying newspapers and cocoa powder packaging in the excavated soil of a potato field in Switzerland, beaches seamed at the waterline by a carpet of Styrofoam and plastic containers. In equally delicately composed images, the filmmaker focuses on the machines and people who work away at these garbage landscapes. They excavate and compact, collect and sort, sweep and rake, move one thing this way and the other that way with grapplers or hands. Well-formed and without comment, the inner workings of a self-sustaining system are revealed in which a process of alienation is underway that causes problem and solution to drift apart.
Sylvia Görke

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Cinematographer
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Editor
Samira Ghahremani, Michael Palm
Producer
Michael Kitzberger, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Wolfgang Widerhofer, Markus Glaser
Sound
Sergey Martynyuk, Nora Czamler
Sound Design
Florian Kindlinger, Flora Rajakowitsch
World Sales
Salma Abdalla
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize, Gedanken Aufschluss Prize, Young Eyes Film Award
Audience Award Competition 2020
Media Name: d61c3c2e-533c-421e-a3d2-045f691ab0dc.jpg
Robin’s Hood
Jasmin Baumgartner
Robin, president of the Vienna football club RSV, loves his “dirty rotten bunch”. Passion is his recipe. That goes for moral courage, discipline and parties.
Media Name: d61c3c2e-533c-421e-a3d2-045f691ab0dc.jpg

Robin’s Hood

Robin’s Hood
Jasmin Baumgartner
Competition for the Audience Award 2020
Documentary Film
Austria
2020
93 minutes
English,
German,
Serbian
Subtitles: 
German

Fluctuation at the Vienna football club RSV is high. Coach Robin, who once hosted parties at the Prater sauna, sees his club as a political project, too: Players from various birth nations come together in his “dirty rotten bunch”. Athletic highlights are quite often followed by relegation, discipline and excess are cheek by jowl at RSV. Director Jasmin Baumgartner has followed Robin and his team over several years.

“My players are like my kids”, Robin says. And kids can be exhausting. They are caught with joints by the police on their way to the Slovenian training camp or prefer to go to the casino instead of completing their training units. But even president Robin isn’t averse to parties. On the sidelines of the amateur league it can get boozy and often rough: Opposing fans insult and discriminate against black athletes in particular. A behaviour for which Robin has no patience at all. He sees it this way: “If we integrate the super sweet Muslim fraction in our club, with our Serbian nationalists, uneducated Austrians and our Muslim-hating Congolese players, then we’ll not only be promoted to the fourth division. We’ll even stop the rise of the right-wing nationalists.”
Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jasmin Baumgartner
Cinematographer
Anna Hawliczek, Olga Kosanovic
Editor
Matthias Writze
Producer
Jasmin Baumgartner
Co-Producer
Dominic Spitaler
Score
Nvie Motho
Winner of: Gedanken Aufschluss Prize
Media Name: ec5942e3-409f-4921-a847-4a48534b2219.jpg

Self

Self
Claudia Larcher
Animation Perspectives 2021
Animated Film
Austria
2015
8 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

Nothing is closer to us than our skin. Its beautiful and less beautiful parts envelop the self, separate it from all else. A foray along naked parts of the body takes us from a shiny ridge via a rounded protuberance to a shady gorge. A neck. A belly…ear. A fellybear? Photos, videoclips and sounds form an irritating body collage.

André Eckardt

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Claudia Larcher
Cinematographer
Claudia Larcher
Producer
Claudia Larcher
Sound
Constantin Popp
Filmstill The Standstill

The Standstill

Stillstand
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Austria
2023
137 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English

The film opens with the image of an elderly individual in a hospital, hooked to a machine: assistance is needed to slowly breathe in and out. This existential moment of physical precariousness is followed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s typical long shots, though in this case they do not document work processes but look like a prequel to his fantastic science fiction documentary “Homo Sapiens” (2016): deserted airports, swimming pools, playgrounds.

The filmmaker sets out with his identifiable aesthetic tools to tackle the documentation of the first three waves of the Covid-19 pandemic, from March 2020 to December 2021. In Vienna, a major city with a relatively well-functioning health system, he looks at institutions that are in a “flexible learning mode”: intensive care units, emergency shelters, schools, cinemas. Time and again he visits a flower shop that is not system-relevant but, by its own definition, sells food. Lockdown followed by eased restrictions followed by lockdown. The camera registers how paralysis in the face of a natural disaster is superseded in some people by anger at the restrictions. Meanwhile, cases of Long Covid are being treated in the hospitals. Topical, only a little later, these images cut across the repression of what has been experienced.

Jan Künemund

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Cinematographer
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Editor
Gernot Grassl
Producer
Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Michael Kitzberger, Wolfgang Widerhofer, Markus Glaser
Sound
Sergey Martynyuk, Lenka Mikulova
Sound Design
Nora Czamler, Manuel Meichsner
World Sales
Andrea Hock
Nominated for: FIPRESCI Prize, Prize of the Interreligious Jury
Soul-Things 2022
Filmstill The 3 Rs
The 3 Rs
David Lynch
A nervously vibrating camera, a rubber duck being beheaded by algebra. Short and with a vengeance, David Lynch lights a beacon against the school-inculcated view of the world.
Filmstill The 3 Rs

The 3 Rs

The 3 Rs
David Lynch
Soul-Things 2022
Experimental Film
Austria,
USA
2011
1 minute
English
Subtitles: 
None

A nervously vibrating camera, a rubber duck being beheaded by algebra. In only one minute and with a vengeance, David Lynch lights a beacon against the school-inculcated view of the world. Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic – the three basic cultural techniques “drilled” into us turn out to be childhood traumas and opponents of the immeasurable, the mysterious and the indescribable.

André Eckardt

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
David Lynch
Script
David Lynch
Cinematographer
David Lynch
Editor
David Lynch
Filmstill The Artist in the Machine

The Artist in the Machine

The Artist in the Machine
Claudia Larcher
International Competition Short Film 2022
Animated Film
Austria
2022
4 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None

Her “artificial assistant” is what Claudia Larcher calls the AI that digitally analysed her analogue “Baumeister” series of collages and generated this film from them. Creator or servant spirit, the machine makes architectural sketches waft biomorphically and enlivens (i.e. animates) rigid shapes. The Japanese Metabolists who called for the fluid renewal of their buildings, the organic growth, deformation and decay of architecture, would have liked “The Artist in the Machine”.

Christoph Terhechte

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Claudia Larcher
Cinematographer
Claudia Larcher
Editor
Claudia Larcher
Producer
Claudia Larcher
Sound
Claudia Larcher
Animation
Artificial Assistant No. 2
World Sales
Gerald Weber
Nominated for: mephisto 97.6 Audience Award