On the occasion of the annual Leipzig Festival of Lights, which commemorates the climax of the Peaceful Revolution on 9 October 1989, DOK Leipzig will be screening three short films at Leipzig main station at the start of the week-long film festival. These films will also open this year’s Retrospective, titled “Film and Protest – Popular Uprisings in the Cold War”, which will focus on uprisings against the communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc and against Soviet hegemony. The Retrospective will cover the period from 17 June 1953 to the revolutionary upheavals around 1989/90 and will also look at the People’s Republic of Poland, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Hungarian People’s Republic, among others.
The public screening at the Festival of Lights will include three short films made between 1989 and 1991 that document the anxiety and hope felt during this time of upheaval: “Sitis” by Rainer Schade (GDR 1989), “The Wall” by Anatolijs Pjatkins (Latvia 1991) and “Exit” by Małgorzata Bieńkowska-Buehlmann (Poland 1990). The screening at the Leipzig main station (East Hall) on 9 October 2023 starts at 6 pm. Admission is free.
Because of this, the 66th edition of DOK Leipzig will begin one day earlier, on Sunday, 8 October, with the opening ceremony at CineStar. During the week leading up to 15 October, the festival will present about 200 documentaries and animated films in numerous venues across the city. Additionally, each day during the week of the festival, a different film will be available online throughout Germany for 24 hours in the DOK Stream.
Stefan Ibrahim, a graphic designer and illustrator from Leipzig, has created this year’s poster design, which shows a pair of paper scissors. The original scissors that served as the model were found in the festival’s film storeroom. At the festival and online, further types of scissors are waiting to be discovered.
