Film Archive

Jahr

Sections (Film Archive)

Filmstill 30 Kilometres per Second
Filmstill 30 Kilometres per Second

30 Kilometres per Second

30 kilometriä sekunnissa
Jani Peltonen
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Finland
2023
23 minutes
English,
Finnish
Subtitles: 
English

The narrator of the film was diagnosed with proprioception disorder by her physiotherapist: She lacks a normal awareness of her body in space and thus a reference to the world around her. Dancing as a therapy might help. Instead, she takes a ghost train into Finland’s television history, to the 1960s, when ordinances forbade spontaneous dancing because of a Medieval decree.

Young people were robbed of their body awareness, Finland, with its peculiar position between the blocks of the Cold War, stood untethered in the political geography of the time. Connections were made through television, Swiss campaigns for the independence of the West African province of Biafra, the weightless moon landing, U.S. American stars from soap operas and TV western shows. Travelling without moving. Do ghosts have proprioception? Wouldn’t they float out of this world otherwise? Or are they kept tethered to the ground by film and television recordings?

Jan Künemund

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jani Peltonen
Script
Jani Peltonen
Cinematographer
Jani Peltonen
Editor
Anni Tiainen, Julia Matinniemi
Producer
Joona Mielonen
Sound Design
Saku Anttila
Score
Emil Sana
Narrator
Emmi Parviainen
Winner of: Silver Dove Short Film (International Competition Documentary Film)
Filmstill An Asian Ghost Story

An Asian Ghost Story

An Asian Ghost Story
Bo Wang
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Hong Kong,
Netherlands
2023
37 minutes
Cantonese,
English
Subtitles: 
English

Narrated by the incarnate ghost of a deceased real hair donor. In the post-war era, the export of real hair wigs contributed to Asia’s economic development, with Hong Kong as a major hub. In its heyday in the 1960s, “Asian real hair” was popular with wealthy U.S. women, but then the USA imposed an embargo on the product, now classified as “communist hair”. This is where the intricate and innovatively realised story begins: Starting with complex economical and sociopolitical contexts, it weaves a thread that runs through various historical and dreamlike staged levels.

Hong Kong was and is a space of in-between-ness – between East and West, between communism and capitalism. Perhaps that is why there are so many spooks in the city, one protagonist speculates. Just like the well-travelled ghost, an eternally wandering entity and contemporary witness of an imperial and colonialist past.

Annina Wettstein

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Bo Wang
Script
Bo Wang
Cinematographer
Yavuz Selim Isler, Fai Wan
Editor
Bo Wang
Producer
Ruoyao Jane Yao, Jia Zhao
Sound
Franco van der Linde
Sound Design
Jeroen Goeijers
Narrator
Jia Zhao, Hamza Junaid, Tommy Tse
Winner of: Golden Dove Short Film (International Competition Documentary Film)
Filmstill At All Hours and None

At All Hours and None

In tutte le ore e nessuna
Davide Minotti, Valeria Miracapillo
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Italy
2023
19 minutes
Turkish,
French,
Italian,
English
Subtitles: 
English

“Words are the only instruments I have”, says Aslı Erdoğan in this powerful audiovisual collage. The writer, physicist and human rights activist who lives in exile in Berlin writes against the disappearance and loss of her own language. As a former political prisoner in Turkey, she knows only too well what autocratic violence and oppression intend: to silence people.

In this sense, this filmic portrait sets itself vociferously against the silence. Words flicker between fragments of the history of protest in Turkey. Working with text, photography and archive material, the film embarks on a vibrant visual and acoustic journey through places and times that shaped Aslı Erdoğan’s homeless life. Taking inspiration from her autobiographical collection of prose, “Requiem for a Lost City”, individual history becomes collective. A many-voiced choir reminds us that language is the thing that nonetheless holds everything together.

Annina Wettstein

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Davide Minotti, Valeria Miracapillo
Script
Aslı Erdoğan
Editor
Davide Minotti
Producer
AAMOD
Sound
Riccardo Spagnol
Sound Design
Valeria Miracapillo
Narrator
Aslı Erdoğan, Deniz Ozdoğan, Alexandra Genzini, Pauline Saudriès
Filmstill Au Revoir, Pugs

Au Revoir, Pugs

Au Revoir, Pugs
Brett Allen Smith
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Italy,
Denmark
2023
9 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

At first glance, Brett Allen Smith’s memory worlds seem slightly otherworldly but peaceful. There is a little pug – curious, bouncy and, most importantly, alive, a harmless explorer of lawns and living rooms. At the same time, the director is driven by an inner fracture, an irritation to be illuminated by means of phone conversations with family members: How real are the memories that had such a tremendous impact on him? Like the hill towering in front of Smith’s inner eye under which two dogs lie buried. And there are sunflowers, imposing plants that are impossible to pick for his five-year old’s hands because their roots have bored so deeply into the soil.

Today the director is a father and dog owner himself – there are shots of a baby and a pug – and his thought construct, maybe even something that shaped his identity, is blurring. The phone calls with his sisters lead nowhere. On the visual level, “Au Revoir, Pugs” plays with images, animation and nostalgic effects, while melodies can be heard from far away, sweet and melancholy but also a little uncanny. A compact work of less than ten minutes, a soft-toed sneaky jolt.

Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Brett Allen Smith
Cinematographer
Brett Allen Smith
Editor
Brett Allen Smith
Producer
Andrea Gatopoulos, Brett Allen Smith, Marco Crispano
Animation
Théo Chikhi
Filmstill Beauty and the Lawyer

Beauty and the Lawyer

Beauty and the Lawyer
Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Armenia,
France
2023
105 minutes
Armenian
Subtitles: 
German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing, English

The film opens with the wedding of Garik and Hasmik and ends with a decorated tree for their son’s first Christmas in the new house that his father built himself. Between these fixed points of middle-class family life, nothing is as heteronormative as this bracket and above all the political and religious mainstream in Armenia would lead one to expect.

Hasmik is a lawyer who fights for LGBTQIA+ rights, her husband appears in the media as drag performer Carabina, does sex work and makes his life in a queer-phobic environment the subject of an autobiographical theatre performance. The film, which evolved out of close friendship and is always one step behind the wild energy of Garik/Carabina, takes a precarious, raw, but also utopian-tinted look at current social struggles. The longing for normality, emancipation and responsibility find themselves exposed – sometimes powerless and unprotected – to violent defamation. TV images show the zeal behind the attempted construction of homosexual and trans persons as “Un-Armenian.” Meanwhile Carabina, in a moment of rest from plastering the house, trowel in hand, plays a song by Charles Aznavour, whose family came from Armenia – “What Makes a Man?”

Jan Künemund

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
Cinematographer
Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
Editor
Wei-Yuan Song
Producer
Jean-Marie Gigon
Co-Producer
Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
Sound Design
Thomas Fourel
-
Hasmik Petrosyan, Garik Amolikyan
Winner of: Silver Dove Feature-Length Film (International Competition Documentary Film)
Filmstill Deliverance

Deliverance

Descarrego
Joana Claude
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Brazil
2023
10 minutes
Portuguese (Brazil)
Subtitles: 
English

A fairly shabby, dark, three-part wardrobe in a hallway: About ten years have passed since Joana Claude suffered sexual violence when it was assembled. Now the time has come to not only disassemble it. Instead, Joana sets out to destroy the artefact of pain completely. The gesture is made with fervour, tearing out the shelves and doors looks like retroactive resistance, what was pent up finds an outlet. At the same time, the ritual is characterised by gradual escalation: At first the director speaks of her relationship with her parents – a big sweat stain on her back already beginning to show –, in the end everything is in flames. The act is short, it lasts only a few minutes. And yet it allows an intimate insight that acquires a universal, strength-giving character as it unfolds.

Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Joana Claude
Script
Joana Claude
Cinematographer
Letícia Batista
Editor
João Maria
Producer
Maria Alencar, Joana Claude
Sound
Catharine Pimentel
Sound Design
Nicolau Domingues
Filmstill El Shatt – A Blueprint for Utopia

El Shatt – A Blueprint for Utopia

El Shatt – nacrt za utopiju
Ivan Ramljak
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Croatia,
Serbia
2023
96 minutes
Croatian,
Arabic
Subtitles: 
English

El Shatt in Egypt, in the middle of the desert, was both a haven and a projection. This is where in 1944, based on a deal between the Yugoslavian partisans led by Tito and the British allies, not only a refugee camp for the families of anti-fascist fighters from Dalmatia was built. This is where a model was created for the future Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – a state that was to build its founding narrative on the people’s liberation fight against fascism and declare collectively organised self-administration its social ideal.

Director Ivan Ramljak offers us multifaceted insights into this long-forgotten piece of primordial communist history spelled out in reality. After painstaking research, he combines hundreds of historical photographs and some (few) film recordings of interviews with contemporary witnesses. The lively voices of those who were children back then and are over 80 today tell their stories offscreen: of the struggle for survival, solidarity and lived ideology, in short, of a daily life that included self-organised schools, workshops, canteen kitchens, even a newspaper. Ramljak, tongue firmly in cheek, takes up the thread of history and juxtaposes his skilfully arranged archive material with staged scenes played by the ensemble of a theatre that was founded in El Shatt at the time.

Borjana Gaković

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Ivan Ramljak
Script
Ivan Ramljak
Cinematographer
Boris Poljak
Editor
Jelena Maksimović
Producer
Tibor Keser
Co-Producer
Iva Plemić Divjak, Mladen Kovačević, Sunčica Fradelić
Sound
Miloš Drndarević
Sound Design
Vladimir Živković
World Sales
Marcella Jelić
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize, MDR Film Prize
Filmstill Extended Presences

Extended Presences

Cinzas e nuvens
Margaux Dauby
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Portugal,
Belgium
2023
12 minutes
Portuguese (Portugal)
Subtitles: 
English, German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing

The gaze is firmly fixed on the horizon and distant tree lines, distinguishing natural from smoke clouds. Seasonal work for Portuguese women who observe the landscape from behind the glass panes of fire lookout towers, radio always in reach to report wildfires immediately upon discovery. While the boundary of the visible blurs in the grain of the analogue film stock, Dina, Adriana, Ana Paula, Helena, Luisa, Cristina, Dulce, Lídia, Inês, Fátima, Francisca and Vera emerge as agents of anticipation, modern-day seers whose gentle but persistent peering reaches beyond the burning world. Meanwhile, their male colleagues monitor the situation on computer screens. Poetical textures of waiting and wokeness. The female vision is sharpened and has expectations from the not yet visible future.

Jan Künemund

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Margaux Dauby
Cinematographer
Margaux Dauby, Afonso Marmelo
Editor
Raul Domingues
Producer
Margaux Dauby
Co-Producer
Roxanne Gaucherand
Sound
Margaux Dauby
Sound Design
Margaux Dauby, Paulo Lima, Selia Çakir
Filmstill Heaven and Home

Heaven and Home

Heaven and Home
Daniil Lebedev
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Turkey
2023
30 minutes
English,
Russian
Subtitles: 
English

Blessed is the person whose home is his kingdom of heaven. They do not have to choose between staying and leaving. The filmmaker left with Katya, Olya, Misha and Finn when his home country Russia covered the whole of Ukraine with terror. They found a piece of heaven on the Turkish island of Heybeliada, where they were soon joined by the painter Yu, who comes from China but studied art in Russia. “China and Russia are very big countries,” an insert explains, “yet here we are, sharing a room in Turkey.” “Heaven and Home” is a snapshot of a temporary exile, a clever and melancholy reflection on origins, community and parting.

The Turkish flag flies from one of the hills on the island. If you climb a mountain you raise your country’s flag to say: This is where I come from. At the Chess World Championship 1990, the Russians Karpov and Kasparov played against each other, one of them under the Soviet flag, the other under a new one representing a democratic Russia. Today, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is waged under this flag. At a pro-war motorcade in Berlin both flags fly in harmony, the Soviet and the Russian one. And Kasparov is once more presenting a flag for a future Russia from which the bloody red has now been erased.

Christoph Terhechte

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Daniil Lebedev
Cinematographer
Daniil Lebedev
Editor
Daniil Lebedev
Producer
Daniil Lebedev
-
Farida Gasimli
Filmstill I Still Talk to You

I Still Talk to You

Mən hələ də səninlə danışıram
Turkan Huseyn
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Azerbaijan
2023
15 minutes
Azerbaijani
Subtitles: 
English

A poetical quotation puts a damper on high expectations of earthly life. Because human beings were not sent to earth but cast out to it. Disappointments are to be expected. In “I Still Talk to You,” Turkan Huseyn illustrates a conversation with her friend. It is about love and the longing to return to the past, about childhood and its no longer existing coordinates in time and space. A melancholy dialogue broken up by brief encounters: stranded looking people who also explain their views of and experiences with love. Meanwhile, the fish in the Caspian Sea are coated in a thin layer of oil that merely needs to be wiped off. It used to be less dirty here, Turkan Huseyn says. When you are a child, everything seems less dirty, her friend replies. A laconic zooming back and forth between inside and outside, in the centre of which a few buckets of blood-red flowers bloom anyway.

Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Turkan Huseyn
Cinematographer
Turkan Huseyn
Producer
Emil Najafov, Turkan Huseyn
Sound Design
Hafiz Ibrahim
Filmstill Kumva – Which Comes from Silence

Kumva – Which Comes from Silence

Kumva – Ce qui vient du silence
Sarah Mallégol
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
France
2022
108 minutes
French,
Kinyarwanda
Subtitles: 
English

Quietly and discreetly, the French director Sarah Mallégol follows a group of thirty-something protagonists who survived the 1994 Rwanda genocide as children. They have no memory of the events – neither those whose fathers were murdered nor those whose parents were responsible. A confrontation begins: focused conversations between generations which, captured by a gentle camera, are meant to cautiously break the long silence – in order to be able to understand, process and mourn.

Sarah Mallégol herself grew up in Rwanda, before the genocide. She has no memories of her childhood either. But there are home movies shot on Super 8 that show carefree days in a still peaceful countryside – and her nanny from back then, Christine. She died in 1994, which is all the director knows. Her motivation for this filmic search is thus personal. But after the short introduction, she gives all the space to those who live in Rwanda today with the trauma that has spread over the country like a shroud. Grief is at the forefront and the film work contributes to a much-needed coming to terms – accompanied by chants and landscape shots added to the memories of the survivors that bear a different form of witness.

Borjana Gaković

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Sarah Mallégol
Cinematographer
Arnaud Alain
Editor
Marie Beaune
Producer
Louise Hentgen
Sound
Eugène Safali, Pierre George, Jocelyn Robert
-
Ugo Casabianca
Winner of: Prize of the Interreligious Jury
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 Lumene : Privatisation

Lumene : Privatisation

Lumene : Privatisation
David Shongo
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
DR Congo
2022
30 minutes
French,
Lingala
Subtitles: 
English

In this documentary essay, Congolese artist David Shongo addresses the problems of knowledge production and asks the important question of how it was influenced permanently and systematically by colonialist power. Analysing historical photographs, he exposes the perfidious mechanisms of colonial historiography and contrasts them with conversations with traditional scholars. They represent an exploited culture confronted not only with the theft of economic goods. It was also robbed – in a historical dimension, too – of self-perception and self-determination.

The starting point of his analysis is the examination of the photo archive of the German ethnographer and anthropologist Hans Himmelheber at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich. But Shongo’s critique of colonial historical fictions – poetic and meticulously precise at the same time – goes far beyond this. Combining specially produced and expressive images of present-day Congo with staged scenes, an offscreen commentary and documentary recordings, he manages to penetrate extremely complex contexts. A film essay that denounces the “privatisation of memory” – and contributes a long overdue, extremely important political and aesthetic position to the virulent restitution debate.

Borjana Gaković

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
David Shongo
Script
David Shongo
Cinematographer
Peter Miyalu
Editor
Derek Simba, David Shongo
Producer
David Shongo
Co-Producer
Nanina Guyer
Animation
Derek Simba
Filmstill Mamie 44

Mamie 44

Mamie 44
Lucie Dèche
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
France
2023
55 minutes
French
Subtitles: 
English

An old family secret is fermenting in the father’s winery in southwest France. The grandfather had been executed by the Résistance in 1944 because he had collaborated with the Nazis. For decades, no one talked about it, daily work continued, from cultivation to harvest, from the wine press to maturation, an eternal cycle. The daughter comes to visit with a camera and a microphone. She remixes the sounds of farming, asks questions, builds openings in the experimental interstices between image and sound for the father to come to himself. Maybe what was buried and ploughed under can be reflected today – if they succeed in breaking the cycle for a moment.

The father has answers. He knows the patriarchal system of agriculture, where neighbours are envious and unpleasant things are quickly interred so they will not be passed on to the children. And yet what was interred has not dissolved completely, over generations. Insects buzz over the soil, something underneath attracts them. A small frog is caught in the wine press with the grapes. And the filmmaker’s daughter looks for a new tune on the old family piano.

Jan Künemund

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Lucie Dèche
Cinematographer
Lucie Dèche
Editor
Caro Beuret
Producer
Guillaume Bordier
Sound Design
Lucie Dèche
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize
Filmstill Nowhere Near

Nowhere Near

Nowhere Near
Miko Revereza
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Philippines
2023
95 minutes
Filipino,
English
Subtitles: 
English, German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing

How does an undocumented individual document themself? This is the question the Filipino filmmaker who grew up illegally in Los Angeles asks himself. His extended family live scattered across the USA and the Philippines. Now he embarks on a journey to his estranged native country, driven by the desire to overcome a curse that has profoundly disturbed the family history over generations. The colonial past is a heavy burden even today, even in the diaspora. Filipino itself, the official language with its countless loanwords from Spanish and English, is nothing but a linguistic by-product of the colonial era.

By re-locating Miko Revereza tries to come to terms with the experience of distance and loss of identity with a remarkably idiosyncratic and creative approach. His psychogeographical filmic journey is dense and meandering, the camera sometimes literally destabilised as if by the curse. By means of superimpositions and improvised music a melancholic but never accusing memoir is created that lingers in our minds. The filmmaker, who showed “The Still Side” at DOK Leipzig in 2021, lives in Mexico today.

Annina Wettstein

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Miko Revereza
Script
Miko Revereza
Cinematographer
Miko Revereza
Editor
Miko Revereza
Producer
Shireen Seno
Sound Design
Miko Revereza, Kevin T. Allen
Score
Vincent Yuen Ruiz
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize
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