Film Archive

Jahr

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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

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

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

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Fabrizio Polpettini
Cinematographer
Valentina Provini
Editor
Marylou Vergès
Producer
Fabrizio Polpettini
Co-Producer
Pierre-André Belin
International Competition 2022
Filmstill A Hawk as Big as a Horse
A Hawk as Big as a Horse
Sasha Kulak
In the periphery of Moscow, transgender ornithologist Lydia works at realising her dream to make the “Twin Peaks” universe more and more manifest in her life.
Filmstill A Hawk as Big as a Horse

A Hawk as Big as a Horse

Yastreb razmerom s loshad’
Sasha Kulak
International Competition 2022
Documentary Film
France
2022
74 minutes
Russian
Subtitles: 
English

A blue wooden house at the edge of the forest, lonely, but not peaceful and quiet. This is where Lydia lives, a transgender ornithologist who presents herself in high heels and a pearl necklace one day, in cargo pants and functional wear the next. Director Sasha Kulak calls her film a documentary fairy tale, and the borders between reality and fiction are blurred indeed, because Lydia loves play, staging, the uncanny – and David Lynch.

Lydia has watched “Twin Peaks” more than thirty times, its characters and plots have long since spilled over into Shcherbinka, a small town south of Moscow. She claims to find bodies in the underbrush and even Lynch’s “Red Room” has been replicated under the roof of her house. Now she’s facing a new challenge: the creation of Lara, a lifelike silicone doll whose voice also guides us through Kulak’s cinematic tale. Lydia works hard at realising her dreams, but she is equally passionate about studying birds and the so-called Nezhulyas, shy eyeless creatures that are exceedingly cuddly and have tantric potential. “A Hawk as Big as a Horse” becomes a vehicle of Lydia’s visions, using three-dimensional animation and various cinematic techniques to open a portal to a very specific fantasy.
Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Sasha Kulak
Cinematographer
Sasha Kulak
Editor
Sasha Kulak
Producer
Louis Beaudemont
Sound
Andrei Dergatchev
Score
Iakov Mironchev
Animation
Elizaveta Federmesser
Winner of: Special Mention (International Competition)
Filmstill A Life Like Any Other

A Life Like Any Other

Une vie comme une autre
Faustine Cros
International Competition 2022
Documentary Film
Belgium,
France
2022
68 minutes
French
Subtitles: 
English

Over many years, the director’s father filmed his family life almost obsessively. His daughter’s birth, his son’s first steps, and always Valérie, the young mother. An impressive fund of material which their now grown-up daughter Faustine appropriates to tell quite a different story: that of a woman who sees her role as a mother and its demands take away her freedom step by step.

In the here and now, the director observes her parents in the big empty house in the country: her hyperactive father who is constantly tinkering with something, and her chain-smoking mother who sits at the kitchen table and whose sharp mind can only be surmised from her eyes. What happened? What happened to the energetic and independent young make-up artist? The one who admires witches and wants to take a trip around the world. The one who could easily earn her own living but still gives up her job. “The gaze is important”, the now 60-year-old Valérie tells her daughter once while applying make-up. Yes, the gaze is important. And with her film, director Faustine Cros counters the gaze directed at her mother over all those years with a new narrative.
Marie Kloos

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Faustine Cros
Cinematographer
Faustine Cros, Jean-Louis Cros
Editor
Faustine Cros, Cédric Zoenen
Producer
Julie Freres, Camille Laemlé
Co-Producer
Sound Image Culture, Centre de l'Audiovisuel à Bruxelles (CBA), RTBF
Sound
Faustine Cros
Score
Ferdinand Cros
World Sales
Anna Berthollet
Winner of: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, Silver Dove (International Competition)
Filmstill A Night Song

A Night Song

Le chant de la nuit
Félix Lamarche
International Competition 2022
Documentary Film
Canada
2022
45 minutes
French
Subtitles: 
English

A patient camera glides over the everyday objects: still lives on the wall, flowers in the vase, a swaying drop light. The sun enters the cosy home where Noëlla sits smoking at her laptop, playing Solitaire. The situation is hopeless. She’s going to lose against the computer once again. All the while her son-in-law, Pierre, is organising everything she needs, pragmatic and friendly: breakfast, the (last) doctor’s visit – and then the transfer.

Because Noëlla intends to die, and she is determined. Pierre conscientiously manages the paperwork and invites her loved ones to say goodbye. They bring photos and chat with the protagonist who is about to depart this life and who waves one last time before the doctor administers the deadly dose. Bye bye, that’s it. Dying can be so unexcited. This slowed-down, minute study of time very gradually acquires a completely different meaning from what one assumed at first. How one would love to see the onetakes from the beginning again. Félix Lamarche’s unpretentious observation evolves into a metaphor of life. Noëlla’s insistent head-on gaze from the screen into the viewers’ eyes will always be unforgettable.
Borjana Gaković

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Félix Lamarche
Cinematographer
Félix Lamarche
Editor
René Roberge
Producer
Félix Lamarche
Sound
Samuel Gagnon-Thibodeau
World Sales
Robin Miranda das Neves
Nominated for: FIPRESCI Prize, Prize of the Interreligious Jury
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among us women

Unter uns Frauen
Sarah Noa Bozenhardt, Daniel Abate Tilahun
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Ethiopia,
Germany
2021
92 minutes
Amharic,
English
Subtitles: 
English

In rural Ethiopia the staff of a health centre are fighting maternal mortality. They tirelessly appeal to women to give birth in the clinic. But reservations are strong, and so are the practical obstacles. How are heavily pregnant women supposed to arrive in time when the ambulance comes hours later or not at all? Against medical advice, Hulu Ager decides to give birth at home, assisted by a traditional midwife.

With palpable familiarity, the film crew captures moments of intimate communion between Hulu Ager, the midwives and other women. On the margins of the central conflict, the many challenges they face in a patriarchal society emerge. The debates are most lively under the hood dryer at the hairdresser’s: She doesn’t enjoy sex because of her circumcision, the medical professional Welela reports. “Sometimes you have to prepare yourself for sex,” another customer advises. Sometimes it helps to get drunk. But the perky hairdresser is sure: Bad sex is grounds for divorce. The women share their desires and woes with each other, experience solidarity and gather courage for small and great acts of departure and resistance. Men are relegated to the role of extras, if at all.
Sarina Lacaf

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Sarah Noa Bozenhardt, Daniel Abate Tilahun
Script
Sarah Noa Bozenhardt
Cinematographer
Bernarda Cornejo Pinto
Editor
Andrea Munoz
Producer
Sonja Kilbertus
Co-Producer
Hiwot Admasu, Beza Hailu Lemma
Sound
Alex Praet
Score
Anna-Marlene Bicking
Winner of: Honourable Mendtion (International Competition)
Filmstill Anhell69

Anhell69

Anhell69
Theo Montoya
International Competition 2022
Documentary Film
Colombia,
France,
Germany,
Romania
2022
75 minutes
Spanish
Subtitles: 
English

Theo Montoya draws on casting outtakes, melancholy observations of daily life and decadent party impressions from his friends to create a morbid and yet tender portrait of a young, queer generation in Colombia. In a country marked by violence and repression they can hardly imagine their future, but maintain a close, almost loving relationship with death.

This was meant to be a fiction film: a ghost story in which the dead no longer find cemetery space and consequently coexist with the living, including having sexual relationships – which the state rigorously forbids and persecutes. A clandestine nocturnal subculture emerges where erotic desires for which daylight means annihilation can be acted out. A week after Montoya found his leading actor for the project, the latter died of a heroin overdose. More deaths among his friends follow. They are the ghosts haunting the film that was ultimately made. It retains its dystopian character, but the dangers it portrays are quite real: For these young people, they are part of everyday life in Medellín, which is still deep in the shadow of Pablo Escobar and where the search for pleasure and human warmth takes one through labyrinthine abysses.
Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Theo Montoya
Script
Theo Montoya
Cinematographer
Theo Montoya
Editor
Matthieu Taponier, Delia Oniga, Theo Montoya
Producer
Theo Montoya, Juan Pablo Castrillón, Bianca Oana, David Hurst
Co-Producer
Balthasar Busmann, Maximilian Haslberger
Sound
Eloisa Arcila Fernandez, Estephany Cano
Sound Design
Marius Leftărache, Victor Miu
Score
Vlad Feneșan, Marius Leftărache
Winner of: Golden Dove (International Competition)