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Filmstill The Hamlet Syndrome

The Hamlet Syndrome

Das Hamlet-Syndrom
Elwira Niewiera, Piotr Rosołowski
Competition for the Audience Award 2022
Documentary Film
Germany,
Poland
2022
85 minutes
Ukrainian,
Russian
Subtitles: 
English

Five young people from Ukraine talk about their lives after the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all of them fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the war, however, shattered their life plans. Representing “Generation Maidan”, they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. Theatre director Roza Sarkisian produces a Hamlet adaptation with them in which they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas on stage again.

For them Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is not just a historical text, but a current and existential dilemma that has no clear answer. The film follows the rehearsals where different biographies, self-images and political positions clash: A soldier meets his first LGBT person, the feminist quarrels with the fact that the war has undone hard-won emancipatory achievements. Frictions and differences are exposed, compromises are strenuously negotiated. Eventually the film’s focus widens and leaves the stage to introduce the five as individuals with their own inner struggles. The result is a many-layered, dense portrait of a torn and yet powerful Ukrainian generation who, due to the Russian invasion, find themselves at war again, only a few months after their production premiered.
Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Elwira Niewiera, Piotr Rosołowski
Cinematographer
Piotr Rosołowski
Editor
Agata Ciernak
Producer
Andreas Banz, Matthias Miegel, Magdalena Kaminska, Agata Szymanska, Robert Thalheim
Sound
Marcin Lenarczyk, Jaroslaw Sadowski, Andrii Nidzelskyi
Sound Design
Jonathan Schorr
Score
John Gürtler, Jan Miserre
World Sales
Katarzyna Wilk
Broadcaster
Eva Witte-Toetzke, Beata Ryczkowska, Alicja Gancarz
Commissioning Editor
Eva Witte-Toetzke
Nominated for: MDR Film Prize, Leipziger Ring
Filmstill The Poet’s Wife

The Poet’s Wife

Die Frau des Dichters
Helke Misselwitz
Competition for the Audience Award 2022
Documentary Film
Germany
2021
94 minutes
Turkish
Subtitles: 
English

You feel welcome on Güler Yücel’s terrace. The temperamental artist presents colourful paintings of the life she knows intimately. Yücel lives and paints on the Turkish Datça peninsula. Her paintings are a chronicler’s narrative. They capture the exuberance of a wedding, follow labourers during the olive harvest, show a flock of goats. They also tell of her marriage to Can, a politically persecuted poet now dead.

When Güler Yücel feels too hot, she laughingly hoses herself down. Even her latest works must withstand the water test. We meet an unconventional woman who, though old, explores her surroundings with a beautiful joy of life. Inspired by the conversations and by Yücel’s works, the camera goes on a journey of discovery, resting on other women who confidently look and talk into its lens, like the goat herd about her time in the city, where she felt other-directed. Now she has found herself. Later, at a wedding party, the young bride proudly strides towards her future. Güler Yücel, too, has lived her life and known love. One of her paintings shows Can and her sitting naked in the sun. She remembers her husband, the political battles they fought together.
Anke Leweke

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Helke Misselwitz
Script
Helke Misselwitz
Cinematographer
Ferhat Yunus Topraklar, Yunus Roy Imer, Thomas Plenert
Editor
Gudrun Steinbrück
Producer
Helke Misselwitz
Sound
Adam Tusk, Luise Hofmann
Sound Design
Detlef Antonius Schitto
Score
Volkan Ergen
Filmstill Three Women

Three Women

Drei Frauen
Maksym Melnyk
Competition for the Audience Award 2022
Documentary Film
Germany
2022
85 minutes
German,
Ukrainian
Subtitles: 
English

In a remote village, whose name roughly means “a cold place”, this film looks for warmth in encounters. The Ukrainian village of Stuzhytsya is situated in the Carpathian Mountains in the border triangle between Poland and Slovakia. The three elderly female protagonists – a farmer, a post office clerk and a biologist – are firmly rooted in a place where hardly any young people are left in 2019, the year of Zelensky’s election victory. Over time, the film crew also becomes, at least temporarily, a valued part of the village community.

Between horoscope readings at the post office, farm work with pitchforks and church blessings of cars in need of repair, Maksym Melnyk, also a native of Zakarpatska Oblast, establishes a growing intimacy with the three women. His documentary style arises from the interaction: In the beginning, he asks off camera questions like a reporter, but as he gets closer to the people, he enters the frame himself. Very few documentary filmmakers today see themselves as a “fly on the wall”. But gifting a pig to a protagonist in front of the camera or letting her cut the camerman’s hair? That’s rather unusual. Taking the single farmer Hanna, who treats Melnyk and his cinematographer Florian Baumgarten – whom she calls “the German” – like sons, as an example, the film portrays a rural lifestyle full of privation that seems to be in decline in the mountain region near the EU border.
Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Maksym Melnyk
Cinematographer
Florian Baumgarten, Meret Madörin
Editor
Jannik Eckenstaler
Producer
Maksym Melnyk, Andrea Wohlfeil
Sound
Roman Pogorzelski
Score
Maksym Melnyk
Winner of: DEFA Sponsoring Prize, Golden Dove (Audience Competition)
Filmstill Rebels

Rebels

Rebellinnen – Fotografie. Underground. DDR.
Pamela Meyer-Arndt
Competition for the Audience Award 2022
Documentary Film
Germany
2022
88 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English

The rough, unkempt facades in Prenzlauer Berg – as if the skin had been peeled off the houses, says photographer Tina Bara. Having grown up in a prefabricated building, the young woman was drawn to East Berlin. She quickly got in conflict with the state, just like the artists Cornelia Schleime and Gabriele Stötzer, whom director Pamela Meyer-Arndt questions in her film about memories, traumas and creative genesis.

Stötzer, Schleime, Bara – none of them had it easy in the GDR. One of them ended up in prison for a petition, the other was harried by refused exit permits, all of them suffered psychologically to the point of pain. Spying, abuse and oppression are reflected in the women’s works. Tina Bara’s dark self-portraits, taken in a sparse Berlin apartment, Cornelia Schleime’s paintings denounced as “garbage art”, Gabriele Stötzer’s photo series of women in cut-up dresses and runny make up – testimonies of desperation, but also evidence of the urge for unconditional self-expression. Meyer-Arndt visits the artists, rediscovers places from the past with them and observes the creation of new works. The narratives shock and touch, and at the same time inspire awe for the vehemently chosen paths in life which more than once skirted very close to the abyss.
Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Pamela Meyer-Arndt
Cinematographer
Lars Barthel
Editor
Andreas Zitzmann
Producer
Andreas Schroth, Irene Höfer
Sound
Nic Nagel, Pamela Meyer-Arndt
Score
Ulrike Haage
Nominated for: DEFA Sponsoring Prize, Gedanken Aufschluss Prize