A total of six curated Special Programmes will be presented at DOK Leipzig this year. The programmes offer insight into the history of the festival and film in general, focus on the work of outstanding directors and explore the intersection of media art and animation. This year, in the spirit of the hybrid festival, the programmes will be shown to the public in cinemas and will be accessible online throughout Germany. 

This year’s homage is dedicated to director, photographer and cinematographer Annik Leroy. Her meditative works situated between film, video art and installation invite us to reflect on European history and the human condition. In her latest film, “Tremor: Es ist immer Krieg”, she combines the ghostly voices of Ingeborg Bachmann, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Anna Freud with images of ruins. “Cell 719”, on the other hand, is a video project about Ulrike Meinhof and the psychology of terror. “Annik Leroy’s works are pervaded by the scars of history and yet are driven by a utopian energy,” says Ralph Eue, who curated the series. “Passionately, she explores how tradition and politics, psychology and environment shape people’s identity.” The homage comprises four films by the artist and can be seen both online and in Leipzig cinemas.

During the week of the festival, there will also be a master class in which Leroy will share her personal view of her work with the audience. This will be held online.

The “Animation Perspectives” programme is also structured as a dialogue. In a virtual setting, media artists Patrick Buhr and Aaron Jablonski will exchange ideas with the online festival audience about their animation miniatures and offer an exclusive peek at their working directories. Patrick Buhr’s works are fragmentary narratives, associative, playful and peppered with ironic humour. He combines hand drawing with 3-D animation. Aaron Jablonski, on the other hand, works closer to photographic reality, which makes his artistic interventions using augmented reality and digital errors all the more striking. As @exitsimulation he creates face filters for Instagram. Users slip into another identity with the help of animated masks that are at times bizarre.

“What impresses us about their work is the fascinating state of equilibrium between sketchy and complex design,” says curator André Eckardt. “Although Buhr and Jablonski follow very different paths in aesthetic terms, they share a creative openness to technical experiments.”

The “Re-Visions” programme looks back at the history of animated film at DOK Leipzig. Animated film has been part of the festival from the very beginning, and in 1995 it was given an important platform in the form of an independent competition. “Re-Visions” celebrates this anniversary with 25 films representing the most diverse animation techniques and narrative forms from the past 25 years of the festival. One programme is dedicated to the first year alone. Political satirical drawings can be seen here as well as the poetic side of this cinematic form — the puppet animation “100 Years of Cinema” is a declaration of love for the history of cinema. The Leipzig festival’s close ties to eastern Europe create a strong affinity to that major home of international animated film. Proof of this is the Polish entry “The Gentle Giant” by Marcin Podolec about a young poetry slammer. This entry stands for countless films at DOK Leipzig that conjoin the worlds of animation and documentary film. “Re-Visions” can be viewed on the cinema screen and online.

DOK Leipzig offers the complete range of animation and documentaries to even the youngest film fans. In the “Kids DOK” programmes, the festival presents documentary and animated films for audiences as young as age 5, 8, 10 and 14 — in cinemas as well as online. The protagonists of the documentary films are all children and adolescents who invite the audience to enter their worlds.

This year, Leipzig’s main railway station will not only be the venue for current productions, but will also show films on the theme of industrial heritage. Together with the Saxon State Archives, DOK Leipzig will present a programme about stations and railways that will take the audience back to the 1960s to 1980s with a bit of humorous nostalgia. Included is a film clip about the Mitropa company as well as films about Leipzig’s station forecourt and the Leipzig suburban railway. Amateur feature films, music and advertising films on the subject can also be discovered here.

The Leipzig region is also topic of another Special Programme. Together with the DEFA Foundation, the festival is screening Kurt Tetzlaff’s documentary film “Memories of a Landscape — to Manuela”, which was restored in 2018. In this 1983 film, the director followed the lives of a number of people south of Leipzig for several years, whose villages had to make way for lignite mining and were thus forced to say farewell and make a new start. Tetzlaff’s films received several awards in Leipzig and at other international festivals.

Tetzlaff’s film gives a taste of a more extensive programme with works by the director which was planned for 2020 but has had to be postponed to 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The film programme on the subject of industrial heritage is funded by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony. This measure is co-financed by tax revenues on the basis of the budget adopted by the Saxon State Parliament.

DOK Leipzig would also like to thank the Saxon State Archive, the DEFA Foundation and the Promenaden Hauptbahnhof for their sponsorship and support of the Special Programmes.