DOK Leipzig’s 2021 film programme will take place entirely in the city’s cinemas, once again placing greater emphasis on film history with the showing of a Retrospective and two Matinees that had to be postponed last year. Meanwhile, film series outside the competitions will explore the interfaces between animation art and music history, focus on outstanding film artists, and offer exciting discoveries for children and young people.
Several programmes deal with the thematic complex of remembrance, reconciliation and commemoration. Planned for 2020 but impossible to realise in the hybrid festival edition, the Retrospective will run this year instead. Under the title ”The Jews of the Others: Divided Germany, Distributed Guilt, Dissected Images“ it spans a historical arc from the National Socialist propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area, 1944) to the documentary film Das leere Haus (The Empty House, 2004) about neighbourhood resistance to a Jewish community centre in prosperous Leipzig after the turn of the millennium.
The title of the series refers to attributions of Jewishness and the examination of the Shoah in German and German-language film productions, especially during the years that the country was divided. How did the two new German republics look at the old common guilt? What ideological and social premises shaped this view? These questions arise, for example, in relation to the GDR TV production Aktion J (Operation J, 1961) by Walter Heynowski, about West German Under-Secretary of State Hans Globke’s Nazi past. Continuities of the fascist past are also confronted in the West German short documentary Es muß ein Stück vom Hitler sein (That Must Be a Piece of Hitler, 1963), which features biting commentary by Walter Krüttner about tourism in Hitler’s beloved Obersalzberg region during the post-war period. Guests with (film) historical expertise are invited to all film talks.
“In essence, we are talking about appropriation in relation to historical material, but also to Jewish suffering,” curator Sylvia Görke says. Co-curator Ralph Eue adds: “Harun Farocki once spoke of images that are meant to testify against themselves. This thought has always preoccupied us in the selection and contrapuntal compilation of the films.”
The Retrospective is funded by the The Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany. During the festival week, the series will be complemented by the study presentation "Eichmann and the Cold War on East and West German Television". The Matinee Saxon State Archive will highlight the topic with local film examples of the GDR’s culture of commemorating the National Socialist past.
The Homage of the 64th festival edition is dedicated to renowned Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi, who also has a family connection to Leipzig. Mograbi's mother fled from Leipzig to Palestine as a child to escape the Nazis. With Once I Entered a Garden, Z32 and The First 54 Years - An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation, three works will be presented in which Mograbi takes a critical and ironic approach to dealing with Israel's politics in the Middle East conflict. He will also address his form of documentary self-dramatisation in a master class.
Another master class entitled "Editing Makes the Film” will feature the renowned editor Mary Stephen. She will present Nude at Heart, her own edited version of the film Odoriko by Yoichiro Okutani. How do considerably different artistic visions emerge from the same documentary footage? In the juxtaposition of director's cut and editor's cut, Mary Stephen will address the editor’s role between serviceable craft and creative co-authorship.
There was already a foretaste of the DEFA Matinee in honour of Kurt Tetzlaff in 2020. This year, the programme “Kurt Tetzlaff – Reports from the Time of Change” will be realised in cooperation with the DEFA Foundation. A short film and two feature-length films by the director will be shown as a double feature of his last two DEFA productions: Im Durchgang – Protokoll für das Gedächtnis (In Transit: Report for Posterity, 1990) and Im Übergang – Protokoll einer Hoffnung (In Transition: Report on a Hope, 1991). Tetzlaff's work has been shown several times in Leipzig and won a Silver Dove in 1975, though some of the director's films were denied screening at the festival during the GDR era. Nevertheless, DOK Leipzig was always "an encounter with the world" for Tetzlaff, who was a member of the festival committee from 1973 to 1989.
With the Re-Visions series, DOK Leipzig will take another look at its own festival history from a contemporary perspective. The 1995 award-winning archive film Mother Dao, the Turtlelike collages visual and audio documents about Dutch colonial history in Indonesia. The film will be rescreened and director Vincent Monnikendam will be presented with the Silver Dove, which did not reach him by post at the time.
The animation film programme Modular & Modified: Animation and Musique Concrète will be a foray into pop culture, research and sound labs, traveling all the way to the inner worlds of humans and machines. "Together with the audience, we want to rummage with relish in what are probably the most shimmering departments of media history," say André Eckardt and co-curator Cornelia Friederike Müller (aka CFM). "We want to explore how animation and electronic music are related.”
Both art forms have manipulated and developed conventional recording techniques from the beginning: Music and animated images have been looped, deformed, slowed down, sped up, played backwards and forwards, and reassembled. The three Modular & Modified programmes bring together Oscar-winning animated films, cult pop culture phenomena such as the TV series The Shadoks, and musical revolutions by musique concrète composers, as well as Björk, Matmos and Max Cooper. In addition, Leipzig artists Connie Walker aka CFM and SAOU TV will give a live audio-visual concert.
In the Animation Perspectives series, two filmmakers will once again enter an artistic dialogue with their works. Video and photo artists Claudia Larcher and Randa Maroufi are united by their use of subtle, sometimes hidden animation techniques. With virtual camera movements, photo collages or tableaux vivants, they create transitional worlds with an idiosyncratic view of social spaces. In Heim, for example, Larcher explores traces of life in her parents' house. And in The Park, Maroufi freezes the creative poses of young people into semi-living sculptures with a 360° camera view. Both artists have previously been guests at DOK Leipzig. Curated by André Eckardt, the Animation Perspectives series, in its third year, is dedicated to marginal phenomena in animation art.
DOK Leipzig also offers a whole spectrum of animation and documentary works to the youngest film fans. In the Kids DOK series, the festival shows five programmes for audiences aged 5 and up, 8 and up, 10 and up, 12 and up, and 14 and up. "I am thrilled at how seriously children and young people are taken in these contributions," curator Lina Dinkla says. There will be a colourful mix of animated films for preschool-aged children, and documentaries with young protagonists that offer schoolchildren and young people diverse insights into other ways of life.
The Doc Alliance Selection will present the films Gabi, Between Ages 8 and 13 by Engeli Broberg, and Looking for Horses by Stefan Pavlović. Both works were nominated for the 2021 Doc Alliance Awards, which were presented in Cannes on 13 July. The Doc Alliance festival network was founded in 2008 to promote artistic-creative documentary film and its diversity in cooperation with seven renowned documentary film festivals: CPH:DOX Copenhagen, DOK Leipzig, FID Marseille, Doclisboa, Ji.hlava IDFF, Millennium Docs Against Gravity FF and Visions du Réel Nyon.
DOK Leipzig would like to thank the The Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany, the German Broadcast Archive, the Saxon State Archive and the DEFA Foundation for their funding and support of the film series.
Please find the film selection here: Our Film Programmes 2021
