The 67th edition of DOK Leipzig will pay homage to the two esteemed women filmmakers, French director Dominique Cabrera and Spanish animation artist Isabel Herguera. The festival will also honour the memory of late German director and writer Thomas Heise with a lineup of films, an evening event, and this year’s DEFA Matinee.

Dominique Cabrera’s formidable career has spanned 40 years as has devoted herself to assorted forms of expression, alternating between fiction and documentary, short and long form films. Her films have been screened at numerous international film festivals and have garnered awards at Cannes, the Berlinale, Toronto, Locarno, among others.

Cabrera’s commitment to social issues is central to her documentary work. Her early documentaries have often focused on voices of marginalised people, such as those in France’s banlieues and nearby towns. Her sensitivity toward those she portrays is palpable, for example, in “Chronicle of an Ordinary Suburb” (1992).

Cabrera’s oeuvre consists entirely of personal films, some of which explore with various degrees of intensity her daily experiences and her Algerian-French background as a ‘pied-noir’. It is not uncommon for her films to tackle such complex issues as mental and physical illness, and mortality. Her first feature-length documentary, the video diary “Tomorrow and Again Tomorrow” (1997), deals with her own hopes and fears, yet it remains in all aspects universally relevant.

“Her films are consistently about recognising oneself in the other and the other in oneself,” notes festival director Christoph Terhechte.

Rounding out Cabrera’s retrospective are her feature film “The Milk of Human Kindness” (2001), which deals with ruptures within families, and her documentary “Hi Mister Comolli” (2023). In the latter, Cabrera bids farewell to her terminally ill friend Jean-Louis Comolli, a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma, who, akin to her, had to leave Algeria after the country gained independence. The two converse about life, death, love, and their shared fondness of cinema.

Cabrera’s masterclass on 31 October will be preceded by a screening of Chris Marker’s seminal experimental film “La Jetée” (1962). This film inspired Cabrera’s latest work “La Jetée: The Fifth Shot” (2024), which will celebrate its world premiere in this year’s International Competition Documentary Film at DOK Leipzig.

Isabel Herguera’s oeuvre incorporates such works as “Los Muertitos” (1994), “Ámár” (2010), and “Black Box” (2016), which offer a poignant take on socio-politically urgent themes. In 2023, Herguera presented her first feature-length animated film, “Sultana’s Dream”, as an out of competition title in DOK Leipzig’s section for international animated films. Curator Franka Sachse of the festival’s selection team notes how Herguera’s personal creative style makes her more recent films “visually unique”, detailing that “translucent colour fields [are] set off against porous ink strokes in rich black, unconventional perspectives and an expressive animation”. The composition and mood of Herguera’s films also reflect her background in the fine arts. She studied in Düsseldorf under Fluxus pioneer Nam June Paik, specialising in animation only later. DOK Leipzig’s Hommage to Herguera charts the trajectory of her work, with the first part of the Hommage dedicated to her short films, from her student days to her work as a co-creator, and the second—to her films that showcase her role as an inspirer and mentor. A professor of animation at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Herguera mentors students around the world, alongside collaborating with artists in the development of ideas and providing support to film projects as a producer.

On the festival Friday, 1 November, Herguera will hold a masterclass, discussing an interplay between individual and dialogue-based creativity, using selected documentary and making of clips.

With “Thomas Heise (1955–2024): Odds and Ends”, DOK Leipzig will pay tribute to the work of the celebrated German film director and author. The programme will include three feature-length documentaries, which all centre on fractured lives and which themselves represent fragments of Heise’s work that defies any categorisation.

In “The Iron Age” (1991), Heise reflects on his student project lensing four young people from Eisenhüttenstadt who rebelled against the ideology of the GDR. “Barluschke” (1997), one of Heise’s lesser-known films, portrays an enigmatic man who adopted a new identity for different employers and phases of his life: he was an agent for the Stasi, then the BND and the CIA; he was a trafficker of East German military hardware after the fall of the Berlin Wall; and he was also a father, a failing husband, and a homosexual. In his monumental final film, “Heimat Is a Space in Time” (2019), Heise turns to a narrative that encompasses not only his family’s history but also that of an entire country.

“We’re interested in watching these three works with the audience in Leipzig, a large part of which undoubtedly had experiences similar to those of Thomas Heise and his protagonists,” says Jan Künemund, a member of the selection committee for the German Competition, who worked alongside festival director Terhechte in putting together the section. “Heise’s films reveal an important quality of documentary filmmaking that can also be relevant in view of the current political state of affairs: seeing and examining circumstances without immediately trying to interpret or categorise them.”

On 1 November, DOK Leipzig will also host an evening in honour of Heise at the CineStar. Excerpts from the previously unreleased footage, which Heise was last working on, will also be screened. The event will be moderated by film publicist Ralph Eue, a former curator DOK Leipzig, and filmmaker and author Cornelia Klauß, who has helmed the Film and Media Arts section at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste since 2017.

The DEFA Matinee on 2 November will present Heise’s documentary “Volkspolizei” (1985) and his DEFA production “Imbiß Spezial” (1990). His long-time companion Peter Badel will be in attendance.

On 18 and 19 November, festival partner 3sat will broadcast Heise’s films “Stau, jetzt geht’s los” (1992) and “Heimat Is a Space in Time” (2019) as part of its regular programming.

The complete schedule for DOK Leipzig, including all dates, will be available on 10 October. Tickets will go on sale at the same time.

The DEFA Matinee was conceived in collaboration with the DEFA Foundation. The Thomas Heise programme is made possible with support from 3sat and German Films.

Please find the full list of films in the programmes described above here: Film List