“Changes are always pushed forward most stridently at the point where they were most far-reaching.” That’s how Christa Wolf puts it in the foreword of Maxie Wander’s book “Guten Morgen, du Schöne”, which features East German women giving accounts of their lives. It empowered whole generations to question themselves in unflinching fashion and place their own ideas about life and happiness in relation to society. Five decades later, DOK Leipzig puts these questions at the start of the festival with “Guten Abend, du Schöne”.  
“Fokus Ost” brings together voices from different generations, backgrounds and walks of life. The focus is on what lies beneath the surface – the forgotten or the repressed. The different historical sediments of the Mansfeld Land in “10 bis 20 Halden”. The search for the traces of a utopia linked to microchips in “Silicon Saxony”. “Ortsteil Autobahn” catches sight of the contemporary violence lurking behind the facades of former border facilities. “Übergang”, a film for Thomas Heise that carries out a form of forward-looking archaeology. “Die Klasse von 1990” calls the East German students’ movement of the early nineties back into collective memory. “Strahlen” gives an account of the awakening of this era’s young artists. In a prefab district of Schwerin, a multicultural community finds itself in a garden of hope in the film of the same name: “Garten der Hoffnung“. The same sort of community can also be found in similar surroundings in “Kindesmutter“, albeit alongside the abyss.