From 9 to 15 October, DOK Leipzig will be presenting a feature-length film every day and a programme of short films on the festival Friday as a stream for the viewing public. The films and the short film reel will each be available in DOK Stream for 24 hours following their premiere at the festival. This is a change from previous years, in which the films went online after the festival week concluded.
Starting things off will be “Vika!” on the festival Monday, following a free screening of that film at Leipzig Central Station the day before. On Tuesday, “Sick Girls” will deal with a diagnosis of ADHD in adulthood – as told from a female perspective. On Wednesday, “Knit’s Island”, a documentary filmed within a video game, will be shown online. “Photophobia” can be seen on Thursday; it’s a film about a 12-year-old who seeks refuge from the Russian war of aggression in an underground station in Kharkiv.
Friday the 13th is devoted to short films, with a mix of six animated and documentary films on the theme of resilience These range from the art of reassuring oneself in the no man’s land of a sterile examination room (“It’s Just a Whole”) to the resilience shown by trees after a forest fire (“Tale of the Three Flames”) to the struggle of a filmmaker in exile who must reinvent herself and her art in a foreign language in order to assert herself (“Smoke of the Fire”). In “A Crab in the Pool”, an escape into the realm of mythical beings becomes a lifeline. In “Where I Live”, the protagonist keeps her head high with resilient optimism as she tells of her decline, which is manifested in her flat inexplicably lowering itself within her building. And in “The Wages of John Pernia”, director Ben Young uses historical images from the Wild West to give untold stories of queer love their belated due.
The two films screened on the final two days of the festival also focus on perseverance. In “For the Time Being”, showing on Saturday, a single mother summons almost superhuman willpower in her struggle to prove the innocence of her jailed African-American husband, and in the animated film “When Adam Changes” (Sunday), a teenager physically deformed by mobbing is ultimately the only one in control of his life.
DOK Stream and its selection of films from the 66th edition of DOK Leipzig will be accessible throughout Germany from 9 to 15 October. After purchasing a ticket, viewers can access each film or the programme of short films from 12:01 am to 11:59 pm on its respective day. Each film can be viewed as video on demand via an embedded video player on the respective film page in the Programme at dok-leipzig.de.
Online ticket sales start at the beginning of October. Tickets cost five euros.
The film selection can be found here: DOK Stream 2023
