Film Archive

  • All

Jahr

International Programme 2015
A Baptism of Fire Jérôme Clément-Wilz

The lives of young war reporters who travel to crisis spots at their own expense and risk their lives to shoot the picture that will change everything. A precarious job.

A Baptism of Fire

Documentary Film
France
2015
58 minutes
Subtitles: 
English
French

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Jérôme Caza – 2P2L
Director
Jérôme Clément-Wilz
Cinematographer
Jérôme Clément-Wilz
Editor
Ael Dallier Vega
Sound
Jérôme Clément-Wilz
Nowadays countless journalists and photographers are travelling the world to supply us with the latest news and images from conflict regions. Stories of heroic war reporters were often told in the cinema. Jérôme Clément-Wilz takes a different perspective: news journalism is an industry, too. Many freelance photographers, most of them young, travel to hotspots at their own expense – hoping to shoot the life-changing picture at the right place at the right time and sell it for a high price to the leading media or agencies. The film is an intimate observation of the lives of young French reporters that gives them the space to reflect on their work. Their dreams come true in the Arab Spring: their pictures make it to the cover pages of the biggest dailies. And yet Clément-Wilz avoids heroic pathos, concentrating instead on his young protagonists’ spirit of adventure and youthful recklessness on the one hand and on the tough business where there are no safety nets and where the ones who risk their lives most readily have the best chances of survival on the other. War reporter – a precarious job.

Zaza Rusadze
Next Masters Competition 2015
Brumaire Joseph Gordillo

The last French coal miners in charismatic photos. The present day holds only precarious jobs for the young generation. The end of work in suggestive images.

Brumaire

Documentary Film
France
2015
66 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Juan Gordillo, Martine Vidalenc
Director
Joseph Gordillo
Music
Hervé Birolini
Cinematographer
Laetitia Giroux
Editor
Dominique Petitjean
Animation
Cynthia Gonzalez
Sound
Sandrine Mercier, Christian Lamalle
When the last French coal mine in Lorraine was closed in 2004, Joseph Gordillo had already gone down many times with the miners to photograph them and capture his own fascination for this underground world in the pictures. He portrays the mine as a living cosmos the workers are part of. Even in individual portraits they stay a part of the whole. Their charisma is visible in their shining eyes, their strength in the group.

In his film Gordillo reworks the photographic material, reconstructing the age of mining through pans, processed images and abstract sound collages. A former miner lends his voice – a vivid field report and flow of thoughts.

But Gordillo’s theme is not work in the past but its social significance. And so he adds a second voice, that of a young woman, a miner’s daughter. She can still be proud of her father but no longer of herself. Her life as a cleaning woman in a town marked by decline is captured in its sterility and lack of perspective. The step away from the solidarity and identity of the miners leads directly into isolation. With noticeable consequences: de-politisation, unemployment, a shift to the right. In suggestive images, the film portrays the autumn of the work society over two generations.

Lars Meyer
International Programme 2014
Harvest Paul Lacoste

Every year, a colourful bunch of utterly diverse characters meet to pick grapes near Toulouse. An unusual look at a precarious job between poverty and self-determination.

Harvest

Documentary Film
France
2014
82 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Didier Creste
Director
Paul Lacoste
Cinematographer
Yvan Quehec
Editor
Anthony Brining
The scene: a small wine-growing region to the east of Toulouse. The time: mid-September. The cast: a company of about 15 women and men – “short service volunteers” for the few weeks of the wine harvest, armed with shears and buckets. The group has fanned out among the vines of a medium-sized grower in the Gaillac region. The statistics list them as harvest hands; the sociological term for them is “precariously employed”. The protagonists themselves, however, would qualify this imputation. Accepting it would mean handing over a big part of their pride. This attitude may be called unrealistic, but that’s precisely what director Paul Lacoste seems to be interested in: what people do and what they literally embody because of it rather than the opinions they express. The film still demonstrates almost casually how massively the insecurity of such an existence is inscribed into the protagonists’ behaviour. They all feel constrained by the unvoiced pressures of their situation. They may have more or less talent in suppressing such emotional and mental insights – but their objective effects can hardly be denied.

Ralph Eue



Healthy Workplaces Film Award 2014

Rules of the Game

Documentary Film
France
2014
106 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Muriel Meynard, Patrick Sobelman
Director
Claudine Bories, Patrice Chagnard
Cinematographer
Patrice Chagnard
Editor
Stéphanie Goldschmidt
Script
Claudine Bories, Patrice Chagnard
Sound
Benjamin van de Vielle
There’s a rumour that the employment market is looking for bold individualists. Within limits, of course. The reality is: if it doesn’t fit, it’s made to fit – or rejected.
Lolita does not smile readily. Kevin doesn’t know how to sell himself. Hamid can’t abide bosses. They are twenty. They have no qualifications. They are looking for work and will be trained by a consulting agency over six months to learn the behaviour and forms of expression today’s employment market demands.
The consultants’ motives are more than honest: to enable young people to lead a decent life in the existing system. The kids see a new and strange world open up before their eyes. Both sides practice the best intentions, but now and then there are still glitches and sometimes there’s even the risk of a crash.
We’ve seen films about the admission process of acting schools (“Addicted to Acting”, et al.). But such situations, though exciting, are child’s play compared to the roles Lolita, Kevin and Hamid must learn to play if they want a part in the performance that is called “living (and surviving) in capitalism today”.

Ralph Eue



Golden Dove in the International Competition Documentary Film 2014