This year’s DOK Leipzig Retrospective will focus on a neglected part of German film and television history: documentaries made by women in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

“The Female Documentarists of the GDR” is curated by Carolin Weidner and Felix Mende with an awareness that only a few female directors from the former GDR have made it into documentary film lore. What did it mean to be a female documentary filmmaker in the GDR? What kind of films were made over the course of forty years?

The six programmes in the Retrospective include portraits of institutions, essays and observations of everyday life – including DEFA, university and TV productions dating from the founding of the GDR in 1949 to the year the Wall fell. “We spent a lot of time on taking stock at first,” says curator Carolin Weidner. “The book ‘She. DEFA Directors and Their Films’, edited by Cornelia Klauß and Ralf Schenk, was undoubtedly an important signpost here.”

Films by such noted documentarists as Helke Misselwitz (“Who’s Afraid of the Bogeyman”, 1989), Tamara Trampe (“Once I Was a Child”, 1986) and Petra Tschörtner (“Behind Windows”, 1984), all of whom remained active in their profession after German unification, are the better-known works in the Retrospective. Many of these films exhibit a personal approach, examining the experiences of individuals in the socialist system. They are devoted to such themes as work and art, childhood and motherhood. They explore the perspectives of women as well as the male-dominated world of the National People’s Army.

Female directors also made films, however, on which the dictatorship of the Socialist Party (SED) left a distinct mark, as co-curator Felix Mende points out: “Just like the men, women were enlisted to produce ideological self-affirmations, full of brigades, festivities, clear enemy stereotypes. Of course, even under such conditions, a few works were created whose perspective, though following the party line, show a certain idiosyncrasy and portray more than what was already known anyway.”

The Retrospective will therefore also present films that were made in support of the state (“Diary of a German Woman”, 1969) as well as works by such filmmakers as Dagnija Osite-Krüger (“Ablinga”, 1977) which have long been hidden from view. Film historians as well as some of the filmmakers who are still alive are expected to attend the events in this section.

The DEFA Matinee complements this programme by including the limited GDR œuvre of director Angelika Andrees, who is also featured in the Retrospective mentioned above. She belongs to a generation of female documentary filmmakers who experimented with aesthetic freedom at the Babelsberg Film Academy in the late 1970s. Under the heading “Angelika Andrees – The Empathetic Eye”, six short documentaries will be presented, including the film “Home” (1978) about young people in a reform school, which was co-directed with Petra Tschörtner and banned until 1990. Andrees’ works are sensitive portraits of outsiders in East German society and poetic vignettes depicting communal spaces from the “Friedrichstadtpalast” (1980) to the Alexanderplatz underground station (“Peace Posters”, 1983). Andrees left the GDR in 1985 and almost completely turned her back on cinema.

The Matinee Saxon State Archive also ties in with the Retrospective. The programme “Socialist Women’s Images – The Female GDR” showcases films by women that address women’s issues (“Frauen unserer Zeit”, 1969), environmental protection (“Wir und unsere Umwelt”, 1971) and filmmaking (“Tagebuch eines Schmalfilmers”, 1975) in the GDR. The satirical short film “Hilfe, ich bin eine Frau” (1981) formulates a feminist critique that pointedly contrasts the level of equality the state claimed to have achieved with the everyday lives of women in society.

DOK Leipzig would like to thank the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany, the DEFA Foundation and the Saxon State Archive for their funding and support of the film programmes.

The entire selection of films in the programmes profiled here can be found in the attached PDF version of this press release.