Film Archive

Land (Film Archive)

German Competition 2021
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A Sound of My Own
Rebecca Zehr
A visually and aurally outstanding film about the musician Marja Burchard, leader of the legendary band “Embryo”. An ode to hearing, experimentation and inspiration.
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A Sound of My Own

A Sound of My Own
Rebecca Zehr
German Competition 2021
Documentary Film
Germany
2021
52 minutes
English,
German
Subtitles: 
English

She first appeared on stage at the age of eleven with the legendary Krautrock band “Embryo”. Her father, Christian Burchard, founded the band in 1969 and led it until 2016. Today – in her mid-thirties – Marja Burchard is the bandleader in this project, which has become a kind of family for her. But what seems so simple and organic is far from self-evident in an extremely male-dominated sphere, as Rebecca Zehr shows in her precisely observed and designed film.

This strictly and yet lightly composed melange mixes archival footage, psychedelic animation sequences and everyday observations of the normal life of a female musician between organisation and inspiration. With the visual level restricted to black and white and thus deliberately restrained, all the more attention is focused at the sound. The – who wonders? – outstanding score never takes the music for granted but works robustly with our perception. It’s the lucid, calm images and the narrative that is always anchored in the here and now that let this film stay incredibly haptic despite its concentration on our sense of hearing. Rebecca Zehr is not interested in portraying a musical legend, but in showing us what it could look and feel like to not only make music but live in it.
Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Rebecca Zehr
Cinematographer
Felix Press
Editor
Melanie Jilg
Producer
Rebecca Zehr, Katharina Rabl, University of Television and Film Munich (HFF)
Sound
Rebecca Zehr
Score
Marja Burchard
World Sales
Tina Janker
Winner of: Golden Dove (German Competition)
German Competition 2021
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Dust of Modern Life
Franziska von Stenglin
Liem lives in one of the remote regions of Vietnam and belongs to the ethnic minority of the Sedang. Together with friends he sets out into the jungle, on the trail of his ancestors.
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Dust of Modern Life

Pa va hêng
Franziska von Stenglin
German Competition 2021
Documentary Film
France,
Germany
2021
82 minutes
Sedang,
Vietnamese
Subtitles: 
English

Liem belongs to the ethnic minority of the Sedang and lives in a remote region of Vietnam. The observing camera succinctly sketches a daily routine that’s marked more by surviving than by living. With his friends, he prepares for an expedition into the jungle, where the young men want to take time out, continue the tradition of their ancestors, become hunters and gatherers. The more twisting their paths, the deeper the film seems to enter into a different sphere.

We get to know Liem doing everyday activities. Carrying the baby in a sling, he cooks, hangs out the laundry, goes to the field. The giant loudspeakers fixed to the streetlights fill his village with official news and advertising. In his stilt house, Liem prefers to listen to Vietnamese pop music. Soon we feel the rhythm, the unique beat of this life. When Liem and his friends set out in rubber sandals and carrying backpacks, the camera follows close behind, takes their perspective. Shot on Super 16, the film captures the green tones of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, the images develop a mesmerizing depth. The rustling of leaves, the buzzing of insects, birdsong and permanent rain come together in a melodious soundscape. Suddenly time seems to stand still, the separation between screen and auditorium is lifted.
Anke Leweke

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Franziska von Stenglin
Cinematographer
Lucie Baudinaud
Editor
Zuniel Kim, Marylou Vergez
Producer
Lucas Tothe, Franziska von Stenglin
Co-Producer
Cinegrell, Umlaut Films
Sound
Christian Wittmoser, Nguyen Ngoc Tân
Score
Thomas Höhl
German Competition 2022
Filmstill Slaughterhouses of Modernity
Slaughterhouses of Modernity
Heinz Emigholz
From the Argentinean pampa to the Bolivian highlands to the middle of Berlin: a trenchant critique of German history in its most visible manifestation, architecture.
Filmstill Slaughterhouses of Modernity

Slaughterhouses of Modernity

Schlachthäuser der Moderne
Heinz Emigholz
German Competition 2022
Documentary Film
Germany
2022
80 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English

An Argentinean builder who has built council halls, cemetery gates and abattoirs in the pampa as if from a modernist assembly line. Then a Bolivian architect, whose gaudy functional buildings in the highland defy description and imagination. Last, but not least, a new old palace in the middle of Berlin. Connections are plentiful, none of them edifying. Heinz Emigholz uses them for a pamphlet against stylistic amnesia and historical falsification.

The first film in Heinz Emigholz’s series “Photography and beyond” was released in 1983 and, including the two works screened by DOK Leipzig this year in the Camera Lucida section, there are now 35. But although “Slaughterhouses of Modernity” uses a number of sequences from the other two works, it has little in common with them in terms of form and ductus. While the aforementioned rather minimalist films do without commentary and partly without inserts, this one is characterised by its edgy monologues and courageous use of stylistic inconsistencies. Polemics and black humour are not unusual in Emigholz’s universe. But one has never seen him spoiling for a fight as gleefully as in this complex exploration of German history and its ugly manifestations. Not so much a late work as a new departure.
Christoph Terhechte

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Heinz Emigholz
Script
Heinz Emigholz
Cinematographer
Till Beckmann, Heinz Emigholz
Editor
Heinz Emigholz, Till Beckmann
Producer
Frieder Schlaich, Irene von Alberti
Co-Producer
Rolf Bergmann
Sound
Esteban Bellotto, Rainer Gerlach, Christian Obermaier, Jochen Jezussek
Score
Kiev Stingl
World Sales
Frieder Schlaich
Key Collaborator
Angel Cordero Siles
Narrator
Susanne Bredehöft, Heinz Emigholz, Kiev Stingl, Stefan Kolosko, Arno Brandlhuber
Nominated for: VER.DI Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness
German Competition 2014
Zwei Männer, einer mit Glatze, einer mit langen Haaren sitzen nebeneinander.
Striche ziehen. Gerd Kroske

Punk in Weimar, two brothers and a betrayal, prison, departure and action art at the Berlin wall. GDR archaeology bursting with cheerful, noisy anarchy and lines that extend to the present day.

Zwei Männer, einer mit Glatze, einer mit langen Haaren sitzen nebeneinander.

Striche ziehen.

Documentary Film
Germany
2014
96 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Gerd Kroske
Director
Gerd Kroske
Music
Klaus Janek, Die Madmans, KG Rest
Cinematographer
Anne Misselwitz
Editor
Karin Gerda Schöning
Script
Gerd Kroske
Sound
Mark Meusinger, Sylvia Grabe, Helge Haack
“The White Stripe” was the name of an art project in which five GDR citizens from the Weimar punk and underground scene who had left the GDR in 1986 wanted to paint a line around the Western side of the Berlin wall. On the second day, GDR border guards ambushed them and one of the friends ended up in Bautzen prison. Only after years in the West did they find out that in the GDR one of them had reported their activities – and about his brother.
Gerd Kroske plumbs the depths of betrayal, suppression and forgiveness in interviews with the protagonists, including a brash (and not unsympathetic) border guard, supported by a wealth of archive material with the scratchy, anarchic charm of Super 8 and ORWO. He insists without discrediting. The deeper he delves into the past, the more it recedes in favour of the question how both sides continued to live with the betrayal. The topicality of this story emerges in the great final showdown between the brothers as well as in the recurring images of the wall between Israel and Palestine. It’s not that easy to paint lines even today. Especially if it’s the line you want to draw under something.
Grit Lemke