Film Archive

International Competition 2020
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The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant
Jim Finn
The American Civil War dissected: a distinctive 16mm film and animated war board games reveal a divided nation full of rebels.
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The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant

The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant
Jim Finn
International Competition 2020
Documentary Film
USA
2020
61 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

Numerous films deal with the American Civil War, which raged between the northern Union States and the southern Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. One general who rose to become a war icon and the 18th president of the United States was Ulysses S. Grant. Director Jim Finn uses board games to reconstruct the battles and documents a divided nation full of rebellious factions.

“Bloody Pond” or “The Flaming Forest” are the names given to places below the Mason-Dixon Line where many cruel and confusing clashes took place within a few years. Today only cemeteries, memorial plaques, wax museums and obelisks bear witness to episodes of the war that was to be of such vital importance for the shape of the USA today. Jim Finn’s 16mm shots are a detailed inspection of various stations to which he adds macabre anecdotes and trenchant descriptions. Statesmen, ideologists and warlords haunt the forests, ruins and riverbanks here – like the incidences of light which make the footage light up time and again. There is beauty in these images, in the trickling synthesizer melodies, too, or in the stop motion animations of complicated board games. This beauty has little in common with the dark underpinning of this conflict: deep-seated racism and an adamant belief in the right to own slaves.
Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jim Finn
Script
Jim Finn
Cinematographer
Jim Finn
Editor
Dean De Matteis, Jim Finn
Producer
Cat Mazza
Sound
Alexander Panos, Jesse Stiles
Score
Colleen Burke
Animation
Jim Finn
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize
Filmstill The Dependents

The Dependents

En la luna es el día
Sofía Brockenshire
International Competition 2022
Documentary Film
Argentina,
Canada
2022
90 minutes
English,
Korean,
Spanish
Subtitles: 
English

For thirty years, Sofía Brockenshire’s father travelled the world as an official of the Canadian Immigration Service, his family always by his side. Diaries and other contemporary documents show the numerous relocations, the destinations in South Korea, India, in South and Central American countries. The result is a detailed mosaic of memories and audiovisual snippets that tries to take not only the civil servant’s perspective, but also that of his wife and children.

When asked where they originally came from, the Brockenshire kids answer cleverly: from the suitcases. Because they travel with them year after year, always prepared to have to leave a place they just moved to. The life of the family is determined by the Canadian authorities, they seem to have practically no say in the matter. Neil Brockenshire’s views on his professional career are ambivalent: full of gratitude and certain to have helped people, but also thoughtful and occasionally resentful. In her film, Sofía Brockenshire re-assembles what was scattered across the globe over the decades: photos, thoughts, desires. “The Dependents” is a personal portrait and something of a reflection about the existence as a professional expat in a world that has no borders for some and nothing but obstacles for others.
Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Sofía Brockenshire
Cinematographer
Sofía Brockenshire
Editor
Sofía Brockenshire
Producer
Sofía Brockenshire
Sound
Julian Flavin
Sound Design
Julian Flavin
Nominated for: Leipziger Ring, Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize
International Competition 2021
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The Great Basin
Chivas DeVinck
The curious and the harrowing in the sparsely populated desert of Nevada with its subterranean water reservoirs. An atmospheric film about how freedom is defined in the US.
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The Great Basin

The Great Basin
Chivas DeVinck
International Competition 2021
Documentary Film
USA
2021
92 minutes
English,
Spanish
Subtitles: 
French, English

Chivas DeVinck works his way up from the soil to the stars to find out what constitutes Nevada outside of Las Vegas. Milieus, places and people are intertwined in a collage. The magnetic core of the whole is the subterranean water from which everything seems to grow and for which everyone strives. What looks like an arid desert landscape or a sleepy little town from afar, turns out on closer inspection to be an atmospheric representation of the rural U.S.

Just before the COVID pandemic brought the whole world to a standstill, DeVinck captures the curious, the mundane and the harrowing in White Pine County in eastern Nevada. There are well-nigh endless community meetings about dog-keeping issues, and farmers who talk to their Peruvian shepherds in appalling Spanglish. There are droning radio shows nobody may listen to anyway, and special church services for sex workers. But people are also preoccupied with explosive political issues: the distribution of water supplies in the arid region, the thirty-year dispute over the construction of a water pipeline to Las Vegas, the continuing discrimination against the indigenous people. Resonating in all this is the myth of the US concept of freedom, manifesting itself in gun possession, the idea of every man for himself and an unwavering faith in the healing powers of capitalism.
Kim Busch

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Chivas DeVinck
Cinematographer
Yoshio Kitagawa
Editor
Matthieu Laclau, Yann-Shan Tsai
Producer
Chivas DeVinck
Sound
Danfeng Li
Score
Felicia Atkinson
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize
International Competition 2022
Filmstill The Invisible Frontier
The Invisible Frontier
Mariana Flores Villalba
On an island paradise in the Pacific, Mexican military personnel are on duty. Nothing happens. And yet they can’t forget the violent reality of their country.
Filmstill The Invisible Frontier

The Invisible Frontier

La frontera invisible
Mariana Flores Villalba
International Competition 2022
Documentary Film
Mexico
2022
84 minutes
Spanish
Subtitles: 
English

On an uninhabited island off the Mexican Pacific coast, members of the army do their uneventful duty. The film watches drills and everyday routines, but mainly the breaks which they spend playing board games in the shade of trees, in hammocks, swimming, flying kites or doing karaoke. The peaceful environment, however, does not hide the violent reality of their country which they are always confronted with, even out here.

In this paradisiacal seeming island landscape, the life marked by gang wars which these young men and women escape for an indeterminate time is visible only in metaphorical images, for example when the calm ocean surges up or when an octopus caught at the beach is slaughtered with bare hands. But in the conversations, the self-descriptions of the military men and women, everything revolves around the reality they grew up in: the brief moment that determines which side you’re on, the constant game of hide-and-seek, kin liability, the cruel consequences of wrong decisions. In her first feature-length documentary film, which is carried by the tension between the visible and the invisible, Mariana Flores Villalba wisely chose not to show the event but its effect.
Christoph Terhechte

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Mariana Flores Villalba
Cinematographer
Claudia Becerril Bulos
Editor
Astrid Rondero, Mariana Flores Villalba
Producer
Carlos Hernández, Gabriela Gavica Marrufo
Co-Producer
Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, A.C., Imcine Foprocine
Sound
Eduardo Hernández, Israel Hernández, Adriá Campany, José Luis “Checho” Bravo
Score
Federico Schmucler
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize
International Competition 2020
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The Poets Visit Juana Bignozzi
Laura Citarella, Mercedes Halfon
When the poet Juana Bignozzi dies, she bequeaths the intellectual property of her work to the young author Mercedes, along with prosaic but even more poetic duties.
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The Poets Visit Juana Bignozzi

Las poetas visitan a Juana Bignozzi
Laura Citarella, Mercedes Halfon
International Competition 2020
Documentary Film
Argentina
2019
90 minutes
Spanish
Subtitles: 
English, German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing

A poet’s life ends and a film begins to carry on her legacy, prosaically at first. When Juana Bignozzi dies in 2015, the intellectual property rights to her work pass to the young author Mercedes Halfon – as the aged lady had decreed. But Mercedes also inherits a refrigerator and a lot of junk that must be cleared out of the orphaned apartment in Buenos Aires. Together with young filmmakers, she transforms the duty into a poetically fulfilling project.

The result is not only an unusual but actually a non-portrait of a poet – and perhaps not even a result. Rather, it is a continuously growing equation of superimposed faces, texts and images that refuses to simply work out. They look at each other as if in rear-view mirrors: Juana Bignozzi, who speaks to the young from her writings full of humble reverence, and her young female admirers who, reading, filming and browsing through Bignozzi’s legacy, feel almost embarrassed by these declarations of love. What confidence the deceased had in them! What tremendous expectations she had of those whose mother or grandmother she could have been! Their own poetic achievements seem too half-hearted to Mercedes and Laura to ever live up to such advance praise. But even as they doubt, they are already deep into it.
Sylvia Görke

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Laura Citarella, Mercedes Halfon
Cinematographer
Inés Duacastella, Agustín Mendilaharzu
Editor
Miguel de Zuviría, Alejo Moguillansky
Producer
Ingrid Pokropek
Sound
Valeria Fernández, Marcos Canosa
Winner of: Silver Dove (International Competition)
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Their Algeria

Leur Algérie
Lina Soualem
International Competition 2020
Documentary Film
Algeria,
France,
Switzerland,
Qatar
2020
70 minutes
Arabic,
French
Subtitles: 
English

After 62 years of marriage Aïcha Soualem is on her own again. Mabrouk, whom she has left, is nevertheless supplied by her daily with food and sugar cubes. Director Lina Soualem is interested in the relationship between her grandparents, who, as the last remaining Algerians in Thiers, France, look back on an eventful past. An empathic investigation all the way back to their native village of Laaouamer which leaves room for ambiguous emotions.

“Soualem” is the password which not only enables Lina Soualem to unlock the tiny, snow-covered village full of cousins in Algeria, which her grandparents left a long time ago. In a sense, “Soualem” is also the title of this gentle investigation of a granddaughter. And Laaouamer, that little place in Algeria, is only the final destination of a long journey which may be narrated via geographical coordinates but interweaves them closely with biographical and emotional ones. Aïcha and Mabrouk rarely talk about themselves. Instead, self-affixed wall badges speak: “The world’s best mom lives here” or “Welcome to the world’s best grandma’s”. To learn more about the couple, whose lives were shaped by French colonialism, Lina Soualem uses private photos and videos. Her investigation is full of love: persistent, but never prying.
Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Lina Soualem
Editor
Gladys Joujou
Producer
Marie Balducchi
Co-Producer
Karima Chouikh, Palmyre Badinier
Score
Julie Tribout, Rémi Durel
World Sales
Anna Berthollet
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize
Filmstill Tropic Fever

Tropic Fever

Tropic Fever
Mahardika Yudha, Robin Hartanto Honggare, Perdana Roswaldy
International Competition 2022
Documentary Film
Indonesia,
Netherlands
2022
59 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
English

The semi-autobiographical account of a European plantation manager on Sumatra during Dutch colonial rule becomes a starting point for reflections on the structure of the plantation itself. An essay about local tobacco and rubber cultivation, the construction of skin colour as a social category and the "tropic fever” which rises slowly but inexorably, edited from archive material dating from 1890 to 1930.

Very few films have made use of the extensive material shot by the colonists in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Those who took up the task, like “Mother Dao” or recently “They Call Me Babu”, did so from a Dutch perspective. “Tropic Fever” is the first feature-length film from Indonesia that appropriates that stock, using photos, documentary silent film footage, home movies and feature films as well as development plans from the archives of the former colonial power, along with the report of a Hungarian who managed a plantation on Sumatra in the 1920s. Mahardika Yudha, Robin Hartanto Honggare and Perdana Roswaldy impressively demonstrate how forests and swamps turned into rigidly organised agricultural areas and how the plantation and its structure became the foundation of the colonial project as such. Suddenly the assumption that “tropic fever” arises from the heat seems doubtful.
Marie Kloos

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Mahardika Yudha, Robin Hartanto Honggare, Perdana Roswaldy
Script
Perdana Roswaldy, Robin Hartanto Honggare
Cinematographer
Mahardika Yudha, Syaiful Anwar
Editor
Mahardika Yudha
Producer
Robin Hartanto Honggare
Sound
Mahardika Yudha
Score
Mahardika Yudha
Key Collaborator
Het Nieuwe Instituut, EYE Filmmuseum, Marinus Plantema Foundation
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize
International Competition 2020
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Truth or Consequences
Hannah Jayanti
A privately operated spaceport in the desert of New Mexico inspires dreams of tourism to new worlds. In the nearby small town, life plans are more modest.
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Truth or Consequences

Truth or Consequences
Hannah Jayanti
International Competition 2020
Documentary Film
USA
2020
103 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

Forty kilometres outside the small town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, in the middle of the desert, lies “Spaceport America”, the first private space mission launch centre. People there have been dreaming of tourism in space for the past decade. Hannah Jayanti observes the people of the town who live in the shadow of such great ideas. She tells of tiger bites and scrap collectors, of sparkling stones, of trailer life and how painfully the past still affects the present.

What starts out as a tale about humanity’s great plans gradually turns into one of the dreams and stumbling blocks of human beings. Step by step, the film approaches its characters and unfurls into a reflection of what remains of a life. In addition to documentary and historical footage, the director also uses virtual reality techniques. When the camera travels through 3D simulations of empty streets and houses you feel that something long gone is made tangible again – like an expedition to a ghost town, at a time when the population will have long since left the planet in spaceships. But the created images remain patchy, the objects are captured only in spots, almost as if this was a map of the stars.
Marie Kloos

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Hannah Jayanti
Cinematographer
Hannah Jayanti
Editor
Hannah Jayanti
Producer
Sara Archambault
Sound
Hannah Jayanti, Scott Hirsch
Score
Bill Frisell
Animation
Alexander Porter, Alexander Porter
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize