DOK Leipzig 2026
Retrospective
“We had to learn: the people are far more interested in knowing how and why misery arises; who caused it; how and in what way it can be fought”, the Bolivian filmmakers Jorge Sanjinés and Óscar Zambrano write about their experiences on the path to a cinema that was to serve as a weapon “against the ruling class and Yankee imperialism”[i] and forge a revolutionary consciousness: a cinema that becomes militant at the very moment of its political deployment, particularly outside the established spaces of bourgeois culture.
This year’s retrospective is dedicated to this militant Latin American cinema of the 1960s/70s. The historical programmes of the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week are evidence of the attention the festival paid to Latin American films. Beside their presence in the International Competition and information programmes, the retrospective “Film in the People's Struggle for Freedom: Latin America”, which comprised almost 60 films, took place in 1972. “Documentary Film in Cuba”, whose influence on the artistic development of political – and not just Latin American – cinema is undisputed, made a grand appearance in 1974. 1983, ten years after the military coup of 11 September 1973, the retrospective commemorated the victory and defeat of the social awakening in Chile. The festival, whose motto during the Cold War was “Films of the World – For World Peace”, reflected the GDR government’s interest in the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements of the Global South, at the time discredited as the “Third World”.
On the West German side, the cinema and festival practices of the Friends of the German Cinematheque (today: Arsenal Filminstitut) provided a similarly politicised platform for the revolutionary Latin American films, especially after the Arsenal cinema and the International Forum for New Cinema were founded in the early 1970s. The Friends’ solidarity with the censured, persecuted, arrested and exiled filmmakers was evident not only in their programming work but also in their distribution and publication activities and even in diplomatic initiatives.
This retrospective explores the special historical relationship between Leipzig, East Berlin and West Berlin, which in terms of the engagement for the political films and filmmakers from Latin America and notwithstanding the complications of official German-German relationships literally left physical traces. For, and this might come as a surprise: Almost all the Latin American films screened in this retrospective can be found in various analogue formats in the archive of Arsenal and/or the German Federal Archives, two of them in the archive of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. The Federal Archives took over the holdings of the State Film Archive of the GDR in 1990, which included many of the documentary films from Latin America that had entered the country via the Leipzig festival and were copied in East Berlin. The State Film Archive also produced internegatives and prints for the Friends of the German Cinematheque. The Friends in turn made films left for distribution and safekeeping in West Berlin available to Leipzig.
Chile played a special role on both sides of the Wall. After the Prague Spring had been suppressed in 1968, the government of the Unidad Popular had reawakened the hope for a “socialism with a human face” in many.[ii] Its abrupt destruction, with substantial assistance by the CIA, was followed by international support for the Chileans who were fighting for a return to democracy and against the human rights violations of the Pinochet regime. “Kino und Kampf. Latin America between East and West” puts a focus on the cultural character of Allende’s reform politics, the antifascist resistance and the experiences of Chileans in exile in the GDR.
Film materials are subjects of history: The presentation and distribution careers of films or the manner and location in which they are archived also bear witness to the social conditions of their production and their long-term reception. The fact that these paths cross national and ideological borders is owing to an international and independent film and cinema scene based on exchange and understanding which preserves, makes accessible and continually updates the cinematic knowledge of an interconnected world.
On the backdrop of this self-understanding, the retrospective constitutes the first collaboration of its kind between the four institutional project partners.
– Florian Wüst
[i] Jorge Sanjinés, Óscar Zambrano, “Kino für das Volk – die bolivianische Erfahrung“. In: Peter B. Schumann (ed.), Kino und Kampf in Lateinamerika: Zur Theorie und Praxis des politischen Kinos (Munich/Vienna, 1976), p. 147. Schumann’s publication inspired the title of this retrospective: a reference to the important role played by one of the great experts on revolutionary cinema movements in Latin America, including in the research for this project. From 1971, Schumann was responsible for the Latin American selection of the West German Short Film Festival Oberhausen and the International Forum for New Cinema of the Berlinale.
[ii] Cf. Ralf Schenk, “1970. Chile, das unbeugsame Gedächtnis”. In: Leipziger Dok-Filmwochen GmbH (ed.), Bilder einer gespaltenen Welt. 50 Jahre Dokumentar- und Animationsfilmfestival Leipzig (Berlin, 2007), p. 67. The slogan „socialism with a human face“ refers to a text passage in the action programme of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party (KPČ) from April 1968. Under Alexander Dubček, the KPČ launched a reform process that was strongly influenced by the critical public and was violently crushed by troops of Warsaw Pact member states, who invaded Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968.
A project by Arsenal Filminstitut, Bundesarchiv, DEFA-Stiftung & DOK Leipzig
Curated by Florian Wüst
Collaboration research and organisation by Andrea Hoffmann
