DOK Leipzig 2026
Hommages & Masterclasses
For Helena Třeštíková, the most important cinematic material is time. For more than five decades now, she has accompanied different people, often over many years, working with great sensitivity and extraordinary intimacy to create portraits of emotional force and social depth. Třeštíková reveals what fleeting glances overlook: the quiet shifts in everyday life, the ruptures, hopes and losses from which human biographies are formed. Behind these individual stories, panoramas of political, social and cultural upheaval simultaneously emerge.
Helena Třeštíková has made more than 50 films since the mid-1970s. Starting from her early series of works about young married couples, she developed a unique filmmaking method. Her films are not just snapshots but rather chronicles of lived time. Třeštíková’s camera lingered where others looked away: with people on the fringes of society, like Mallory, who doesn’t have a fixed abode, or the prisoner René.
The artistic relationship between DOK Leipzig and Helena Třeštíková stretches over many years. This hommage invites audiences to discover the lines of development in her working method from the start of her career to the present. The early etude “The Miracle”, which was also shown in Leipzig at the time, is thus connected to “Private Universe”, which follows the life of the same family for 37 years. The Golden Dove-winning film “René” accompanies a prisoner over a period of almost twenty years while the political conditions outside the walls of the prison shift fundamentally. “A Marriage Story” is an account of the marriage of Ivana and Václav, which manages to endure for four decades and move beyond stormy times.
DOK Leipzig is presenting Třeštíková’s new film “Bára – Diary of a Rockstar” in the International Competition, in which she accompanies the life of singer Bára Basiková over five decades. Past and present intermingle to form a concentrated, multi-layered portrait that simultaneously reveals the deep marks inscribed into society by gender roles.
A masterclass with Helena Třeštíková moderated by Grit Lemke offers personal insights into the working methods and documentary ethics of a director who has left her mark on longitudinal observation like few others.
– Ola Staszel
Empathy is the animated essence of every Trollfilm production – from early films like Anita Killis’ and Hege Krogvig Bergstrand’s “The Glass Ball” (1992) to the most recent work, Anton Dyakov’s “Black Box” (2026). With this year’s Animated Film Hommage, DOK Leipzig wants to honour the Trollfilm Studio – which has been active for more than 30 years – for this ethos. With their insistence on empathy with nature and our fellow human beings they resist fashionable cynical poses and call for a change in our mindset. In doing so, the Studio also tackles the big issues: domestic violence, intergenerational trauma, war. Trollfilm’s radical humanism finds its most complete expression when it comes to parent-child relationships. These are multiple award-winning films that speak to children and adults and that, moreover, are used in educational contexts.
Most productions are multiplane cut-out animations made using an animation stand – set up in the Norwegian village of Dovre in a barn converted into a studio, in the heart of mountains and national parks. This is where vulnerable eyes or fluttering wings are animated. The handmade approach is also sustainable: Many materials are found objects such as feathers; the narrative pace is slow, in keeping with the time-consuming stop motion process.
Despite the serious issues that are addressed, hopelessness is never an option. Indeed, Trollfilms are steeped in a magical optimism which may have spilled over from a mythical nature into the films: Dust motes shimmer like fairy dust in the backlight, Sámi myths and trolls play a part, and in “Mother Didn’t Know” (2020) even a Nisse (a good-natured house spirit) has strayed in. Two Hommage programmes illustrate the cinematic variety and incitement to optimistic thinking. One is dedicated to the work of Trollfilm founder Anita Killi, the other brings together other Trollfilm productions.
– Marie Ketzscher
