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Comparing Now and Then

Documentary Film
Germany
2012
6 minutes
subtitles: 
No

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Nina Wiesnagrotzki
Nina Wiesnagrotzki
Tintin Patrone, Michael Steinhauser, Mieke Motör
Nina Wiesnagrotzki
Nina Wiesnagrotzki, Otto Dieners-Konerth
Tintin Patrone, Michael Steinhauser, Mieke Motör, Nina Wiesnagrotzki
Militant, vital, energetic. The inspiration behind Nina Wiesnagrotzki’s 6-minute pamphlet film is Santiago Alvárez’s film “Now” (1965) – also 6 minutes long. With “Now” cinema seemed to have found a brand new idiom overnight. The music, the only sound in Alvárez’s film, was by Lena Horne, illustrated by images of the fight against racial discrimination in the US, photos of Lyndon B. Johnson, newsreel features on police violence, comic strip pictures and footage of Black Panther demonstrations. “Comparing Now and Then” is not meant to worship the ashes of Alvárez’s film but to spread its fire further: images of present-day sites of protest and political strife yield amazingly obvious correspondences with the older film. And the sound? A forceful reinterpretation of Lena Horne’s song by Tintin Patrone, Michael Steinhauser, Mieke Motör and friends. – We are not separated from yesterday by a chasm, only by a changed situation. (Alexander Kluge).

Ralph Eue
Anniversary: Now and Then – Then and Now 2017
Die Revolution kann keiner aufhalten Juan Forch

This film designed by a group of artists working for the DEFA animation film studio is juxtaposing pictures of the peaceful construction under Allende and of destruction and violence under the Pinochet Junta.

1977

Domestic Karaoke

Documentary Film
Belgium
2013
35 minutes
subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Inès Rabadán
Inès Rabadán
Alice Vande Voorde, Vera Cavallin
Olan Bowland
Inès Rabadán
Inès Rabadán
Thibaut Darscotte
A documentary experiment: six women, three housemaids and three employers, who discuss housework and hierarchies, respect and social status, habits and dreams in front of different-coloured backgrounds (red, blue and yellow). Fragmented tales of work and family circumstances make the viewer create their own montage in their heads. Biographies crystallize in front of their inner eye.
All six women, aged between 35 and 64, are played by the filmmaker Inès Rabadán herself. Costumes and masks are identical, so the women whose stories we share are neither marked as representatives of their class (or profession) nor as individual personalities. We hear (and experience!) only their voices and see the actor-director’s magnificent appropriation of their respective personalities through lip-synching and miming. It seems as if Inès Rabadán translated Brecht’s theoretical scepticism of the reliability of simple documentary representation into visual practice: “A recording of the Krupp works or AEG yields almost nothing about these institutes. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. To achieve truth, something must be constructed, something artificial, staged.”

Ralph Eue
Homage Jay Rosenblatt 2017
Human Remains Jay Rosenblatt

“The idea for the film began when I came across an image of Hitler eating. I was disturbed by the image of this monstrous person doing something so human.” (Jay Rosenblatt)

Human Remains

Documentary Film
USA
1998
30 minutes
subtitles: 
VO_English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Jay Rosenblatt, John Turk (Locomotion Films), Danish Film Institute Workshop
Jay Rosenblatt
Jay Rosenblatt
Jay Rosenblatt
Jay Rosenblatt
Christian Bruno, Amy Hunter
Jennifer Frame, Harvey Schwartz, Ellen Bruno, Caveh Zahedi
“The idea for the film began when I came across an image of Hitler eating. I was disturbed by the image of this monstrous person doing something so human.” (Jay Rosenblatt)

Look Out, Hooligans!

Documentary Film
Poland
1955
12 minutes
subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

WFDiF
Edward Skórzewski, Jerzy Hoffman
Antoni Staśkiewicz
Ludmiła Godziaszwili
Edward Skórzewski, Jerzy Hoffman
Halina Paszkowska
An unknown phenomenon is spreading through the streets of Warsaw in the 1950s: drunk and rioting youths. Who are these troublemakers who conformed so little to the official concept of man?

Oblivion

Documentary Film
Germany,
Netherlands
2008
93 minutes
subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Carmen Cobos
Heddy Honigmann
Adri Schrover
Danniel Danniel, Jessica de Koning
Heddy Honigmann, Judith Vreriks, Sonia Goldenberg
Pjotr van Dijk
A country is given a face, or better, a variety of faces: Peru. Director Heddy Honigmann has looked for encounters with a number of people whom one would normally call 'average people', but who, seen through her camera, grow into fantastic and likeable personalities.

Ralph Eue

Practice Exercises

Documentary Film
Poland
1984
12 minutes
subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

WFDiF
Marcel Łoziński
Jacek Petrycki
Katarzyna Maciejko-Kowalczyk, Katarzyna Rudnik
Danuta Zankowska
What do you think of the Polish youth? A street poll with an apparently harmless question. But Marceł Łoziński plays out the scenario several times and exposes quite pragmatically how the manipulation of media and public opinion works.

Super Film

Animated Film
Poland
2016
5 minutes
subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Robert Sowa
Piotr Kabat
Piotr Kabat
Piotr Kabat
Piotr Kabat
Piotr Kabat
Michał Fojcik, Piotr Kabat
A draughtsman-animator has ambitions: he wants to create a milestone of the cinematic art, no less. Using only pen, paper and imagination, in the artist’s sketchbook. A magnificent cineastic punk DIY rocket thunders through the auditorium, racing at the speed of light past quotes from the cosmos of American film and television entertainment on a wild and funny zigzag course. A “Super Film” has its own standards – set by Piotr Kabat.

André Eckardt

The Complete Works

Animadoc
Canada
2015
41 minutes
subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Justin Stephenson
Justin Stephenson
Justin Stephenson
John Mihn Tran, Justin Stephenson
Justin Stephenson
Justin Stephenson
Justin Stephenson
Michael Phillip Wojewoda
The Canadian writer bpNichol (1944–1988) was the uncrowned king of concrete poetry. And a jack of other trades, too: he produced sound art, short stories, nonsense lyrics, comics, children’s books and worked for children’s television. “Complete Works” is animation filmmaker and title designer Justin Stephenson’s daring attempt to visualise Nichol’s work directly, without the detour of a writer’s portrait: by adopting the latter’s obsession with language as a vibrant hubbub where semantics, syntax and phonetics intersect in the most delirious ways.

Letters dance, meaning spins wildly, or a poem becomes an autonomous subject that talks with its opposite, the reader. The contract they have both entered into consists simply of a ban on any boredom between them, because that moment would constitute the sad death of the poem. There are also performances by professed Nichol fans, each of whom narrates a fulfilling experience it must be an excessive pleasure to repeat and share. For his part, Stephenson as the filmmaker and animator contributes to further escalation, driving everything towards more or even maximum excess.

Ralph Eue

The Musicians

Documentary Film
Poland
1960
9 minutes
subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

WFDiF
Kazimierz Karabasz
Stanisław Niedbalski
Lidia Zonn
Halina Paszkowska
The musicians of a company brass band enthusiastically rehearse for their concert. Kazimierz Karabasz lovingly captures not only every detail but also paints an utterly unheroic portrait of the working class. Groundbreaking in many ways. Golden Dove in Leipzig 1960 and the most awarded Polish documentary until today.

The Wolfpack

Documentary Film
USA
2015
89 minutes
subtitles: 
No

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Izabella Tzenkova
Crystal Moselle
Randall Poster, Meghan Currier
Crystal Moselle
Enat Sidi
Richard Levengodd, Cole Wenner
Get ready for the Angulo brothers who spent their whole young lives in a shabby council flat on the Lower East Side. Their Hare Krishna-damaged father, for whom evil began at his doorstep, forbade any contact with the outside world. No school, no friends. The six brothers were virtually never allowed to go outside. Instead they were home-schooled and had more than 5,000 feature films on DVD, their only window on the world. They retrieved it by creating their own cinema, re-enacting the films for their video camera – faithful to the script, with homemade costumes and props. This made them feel alive.

Crystal Moselle was at the right place at the right time, just like in the movies. The power balance in the flat was just beginning to shift, the brothers dared to make the first steps outside – where they met the filmmaker. Both sides connected instantly through their love of cinema. Once accepted into the “Wolfpack”, the director created the gripping psychological profile of a family in upheaval. The old is still claustrophobically present, while the outside is beginning to show itself as uncertain territory that will not be mastered by the patterns of movie stories – as the brothers suspect.

Matthias Heeder



Prize of the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique 2015