DOK Leipzig has unveiled its competition lineup for the 69th edition. Full details of this year’s festival films and XR works, including screening schedules and times, will be available on the website on Thursday, October 8. Tickets will go on sale at the same time.
A total of 76 films, including 30 world premieres, are competing for Golden and Silver Doves across the four competitions. The lineup includes a total of 29 debut films.
“Many of this year’s competing films focus on Central and Eastern Europe. Giving more space to films and filmmakers in these countries is not only a key concern of DOK Leipzig, but also something I care deeply about personally,” said Ola Staszel, festival director at DOK Leipzig. “I am also delighted that we can showcase so many works by emerging directors, and that most of the films in the German Competition were made possible with the support of state and federal media funding agencies as well as with the involvement of broadcasters.”
Of the nine feature-length films in the International Competition Documentary Film, three will have their world premiere and two their international premiere at DOK Leipzig. Among the returning directors are Lukas Marxt, Helena Třeštíková, and Alain Kassanda.
Grappling with the consequences of climate change, Lukas Marxt’s “>1,5°C Pyropolitics and the New World” documents the devastating wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in early 2025. Also born from the urgency of a moment, Asmahan Bkerat’s “Concrete Land” zeroes in on a daily life of a Palestinian Bedouin family in Jordan as high-end villas rise around them, threatening their home. Built around storytelling as a political and intimate act, Ana Bovino’s “The Nights” follows La Pichi as she reclaims her identity and body long pushed to the margins outside Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, acclaimed documentarian Helena Třeštíková, whose oeuvre is honoured in the Hommage Documentary Film at this year’s festival, presents an intimate exposé of Czech rock icon Bára Basiková in “Bára – Diary of a Rockstar”, spanning an impressive fifty years. A tonally different work comes from Andrei Kutsila. His Venice prize-winning film “Letters from the Silenced Country” (the Golden Globes Impact Prize for Documentary) crafts a shaking portrait of the crimes committed in contemporary Belarus, transforming private prison correspondence into a cinematic testimony. Training his lens on the construction of a highway in China’s heartland in “Xiangzidian Village: The Stage”, Hu Sanshou reimagines it as a modern stage, upon which their lives play out. In Giuseppe Schillaci’s “Auber 89” actor Fatsah Bouyahmed turns his gaze on the forgotten 1980s archives of the Aubervilliers social housing estates, which reveal a fleeting hope before disillusionment reshaped the Parisian suburbs. Also set near Paris, Alain Kassanda’s “The Maternity Ward” chronicles the final years of the Les Lilas maternity ward before it shuts its doors after 60 years of feminist work. Accompanied by her camera, Kamila Serwicka’s “Blossoming” journeys into another closed world: her family’s secrets and its troubled history.
The competition also features 13 shorts (see the list of films), exploring a range of themes, from romantic or familial ties to bureaucratic and political processes.
Five feature-length films are competing for a Golden Dove in the International Competition Animated Film. An intriguing animated psychiatrist-patient story is at the heart of Chris Sullivan’s “The Orbit of Minor Satellites”, which transports to an abandoned hallucinatory Cold War space station. A bewildering, heady film, a decade in the making, Xun Sun’s “Magic Atlas” draws on painting and woodcut animation to tell a story of a young apprentice Xiaozhi traversing multiple identities and fantastical realms, including the reclusive coal empire of Luocha, stripped of memory. In a collaborative directorial effort “Son of a Bitch” by Erica Maradona, Tania Anaya, Otto Guerra, and Sávio Leite, a young man, Ismael, hopes to shed his fate, leaving behind his mother, who runs a brothel in Brazil’s Veredas, to search for his father and the ocean whom he had never seen. Turning to animation to contemplate the paths life takes, “We Are Aliens” by Kohei Kadowaki follows a reticent Japanese boy, Tsubasa, whose friendship with Kyotaro takes a turn after a seemingly small incident. Finally, Pierre Hébert’s “Prelude and Fugues – The Wood Thrush” conjures a cinematic poem structured like a fugue, dwelling in an uneasy space between the ideal of freedom and the inevitability of confinement.
The competition features 19 shorts (see the list of films), challenging the status quo and questioning how we live with each other and with the systems around us. Among the returning filmmakers this year are Anne Isensee, Maria Dakszewicz, Veneta Androva, and Aline Helmcke.
The German Competition Documentary Film presents eight feature-length films, seven of which will celebrate their world premiere at the festival.
In a meditation on home, death, and family ties in his debut feature “Cold River: I Am in Leipzig”, Haiguang Li looks back at his native Lengshuijiang in China, which seems to linger at the edges of his daily life in Leipzig. In Janis Westphal’s “Haus der Trinker”, set in Berlin, the place itself invites the multiplicity of meanings, redefining the notion of help within a social care system, as a shelter permits formerly homeless men with chronic alcohol addiction, considered “beyond therapy”, to continue drinking. Julia Groteclaes’ “Hotel Utopia” also uses a space as a fertile site for a filmic probe, plucking us inside an abandoned hotel in the Bulgarian mountains, which draws in digital nomads and investors. Questioning what witnessing actually means, Jasmine Alakari’s “Free Zone” follows an exiled Iranian activist who opens refugee squats in Athens as a right-wing government unleashes mass evictions. Anchored in the themes of inherited pain and generational cycles of addiction, Konrad Schlaich’s “Kindesmutter” unveils a nuanced portrait of a mother-daughter relationship in Halle (Saale). Negotiating autonomy, care, and art in the deeply personal “Mein genialer Vater”, Tete Hoffmann places the camera between herself and her father, an 83-year old writer, who receives a dementia diagnosis. The camera keeps rolling even after one’s passing in “Übergang” by the director duo Peter Badel and Chris Wright, which brings to life Thomas Heise’s unpublished archives and fragments of what was to be his “Heimatfilm”, albeit never completed. A harrowing encounter occurs in Jonathan Omer Mizrahi’s “The Snake Charmer” between a group of Thai migrant farmworkers at the Israel-Gaza border and a military robotic snake camera, designed for Israeli military surveillance in Gaza’s tunnels.
The German Competition Documentary Film also presents 12 shorts (see the list of films), exploring such themes as memory, LGBTQIA+, and mental health.
The Audience Competition features ten feature-length films, all of which have world-premiered at renowned international festivals, including Venice (Victor Kossakovsky’s “Holy Wood Dust”, Erik Shirai’s “Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing”), CPH:DOX (Emil Langballe’s “Petrolheads”), Sundance (Michał Marczak’s “Closure”), and Visions du Réel (Jacqueline Zünd’s “Heat”, Lauren Dällenbach’s “Nicole Nicole”, which scooped the National Competition Jury Prize at the festival).
“Kurtág Fragments” by Dénes Nagy (Silver Bear for Best Director for “Natural Light” at Berlinale 2021) delivers an expansive yet deeply intimate portrait of the musical genius György Kurtág, who is now in his 100th year. Personal and political collide in Ahmet Seven’s “For Life”, centring on a Palestinian woman who decides to smuggle her imprisoned husband’s sperm in the hope of becoming a mother again. A haunting family chronicle also emerges in “White Lies”, as artist Alba Zari reckons with her family’s past and their involvement with the Children of God cult, notorious for systemic abuses. Contrasting in tone, Nhat Quang Nong’s “Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava” (DOK Co-Pro Market 2020) explores what binds their unlikely family trio as they welcome a baby to their ranks, which features Quang himself, a fun gay man with a quirky sense of fashion, his conservative mother Cuc, and his sister Mai who struggles to discern reality from visions.
This year, the winner of a Golden Dove for best feature documentary in the Audience Competition will be decided in an online vote.
The complete programme, including screening dates and tickets: Programme
Overview of the competition films: Film lists competitions 2026
Press images available to download: Film stills
Information about the juries: Awards & juries
