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Retrospective: Third Ways in a Divided World. Utopia and Subversion

Until 1989, the ideological world of our festival ended at the European demarcation line between the two superpowers of the Cold War: the western border of the GDR. The geographical world of the festival was more generously proportioned. Filmmakers from all over the world gathered here – provided their struggle was directed the right way. This Retrospective explores side streets and back alleys, presenting the dazzling and blind spots of Leipzig’s (un-)screened film history.

Retrospective
Filmstill 15.000 Volt
15.000 Volt
Karlheinz Mund
On the overhead wire 15,000 volts, underneath everyday working life on an electric locomotive. On the soundtrack a passenger who the GDR will throw overboard in 1976: Wolf Biermann.
Filmstill 15.000 Volt

15.000 Volt

15.000 Volt
Karlheinz Mund
Retrospective
Documentary Film
GDR
1963
18 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None
No Premiere

This graduation film by future DEFA documentarian Karlheinz Mund presents a piece of GDR working worlds in the best poetic and earthy Babelsberg school tradition: the everyday life of railway workers – with two women in the electric locomotive driver’s cab.
In 1963, Leipzig audiences were able to get to know Mund’s study in the festival’s university film presentation. At the end, the “Spring Song of the Railwaywoman” can be heard off-screen, sung by Wolf Biermann. The GDR still tolerated the rebellious tormentor. Those who heard him in this film at the time probably only found out later that the authorities had long had him in their sights. In 1963, East Berlin’s Humboldt University refused to grant him a degree in philosophy despite passing his exams. Listening to Biermann’s song today, the words become charged: spring storm, great rain, a land waiting …


Sylvia Görke

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30.10.
#373
Passage Kinos Wintergarten
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30.10.2024
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Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Karlheinz Mund
Cinematographer
Hans-Jürgen Reinecke, Gerhard Gläser, Werner Kohlert, Eberhard Teich-Grüber
Editor
Gisela Hoffmann
Producer
Roland Paul
Sound
Günter Grossmann
Score
Gerhard Rosenfeld

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Retrospective
Filmstill Aida
Aida
Marwan Salamah
Marwan Salamah was delegated by the Palestine Liberation Organization to study in Babelsberg. As a one-man team, he realised this portrait of a young educator in a PLO orphanage in Tunis.
Filmstill Aida

Aida

Aida
Marwan Salamah
Retrospective
Documentary Film
GDR
1985
22 minutes
Arabic
Subtitles: 
German (Overvoice)
No Premiere

Words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish float through this film: “Tell me. Perhaps I will remember my home whose perfume is only on my lips.” A 17-year-old Palestinian introduces herself: Aida, the returning one. When her father was killed in battle, her mother was already dead, killed by a bomb. When she was eight, she was sent to a PLO orphanage in Beirut, then to an orphanage in Damascus, then to an orphanage in Tunis. Here she takes care of new orphans. The portrait of a girl expands: countless children who will forget their homeland and origin. There is nothing but war left in their drawings. The PLO had assigned its collaborator Marwan Salamah to study cinematography at Babelsberg. Here, he is also the director. In 1985, “Aida” won the Prize of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Leipzig.


Sylvia Görke

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01.11.
#573
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01.11.2024
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Director
Marwan Salamah
Script
Marwan Salamah, Elke Schieber
Editor
Karin Geiß
Producer
Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR

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Retrospective
Filmstill Associations
Associations
John Smith
Nail polish, a general, a mule. John Smith recites from a text by the linguist Herbert H. Clark. The words evoke appropriate images, but mean something different.
Filmstill Associations

Associations

Associations
John Smith
Retrospective
Documentary Film
UK
1975
7 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None
No Premiere

It was only long after the end of the GDR that the Leipzig audiences had an opportunity to get to know the work of John Smith, the British master of the trenchant, short artist film that continues to expand enormously in the mind. The ideas of conceptual art and structural minimalism prevalent in the 1970s have influenced his works, which he sees as documentary films according to John Grierson’s definition, as “creative treatment of actuality.” In his view of the world details are highlighted which then cease to be taken for granted. In “Associations”, he recites a text by the linguist Herbert H. Clark. Words conjure up matching images, but mean something different. An experience that could also be had in the “actually existing socialism” of the GDR.


Sylvia Görke

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31.10.
#473
Passage Kinos Wintergarten
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31.10.2024
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Director
John Smith

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Main Contact
LUX Distribution
Retrospective
Filmstill Black Film
Black Film
Želimir Žilnik
One night, the filmmaker roams through Novi Sad, picks up homeless people and takes them home. A self-experimentation with a camera, somewhere between social reportage and activism.
Filmstill Black Film

Black Film

Crni film
Želimir Žilnik
Retrospective
Documentary Film
Yugoslavia
1971
17 minutes
Serbian
Subtitles: 
English
No Premiere

1971, Novi Sad, a winter’s night. The filmmaker meets six homeless men, is outraged by the negligent state and takes matters into his own hand. As shelter cannot be found at short notice, he invites the men to his apartment, turning his wife into the involuntary accomplice of his relief operation. The experiment fails, but the film is in the can.
Želimir Žilnik is one of those representatives of the Yugoslavian Black Wave who won the hearts of the West. It is true that at home he found state-funded production opportunities for self- and bureaucracy-critical films like this one. He was even allowed to present them at domestic festivals. But he still experienced Yugoslavian censorship. Strangely enough, however, not with “Black Film“.


Sylvia Görke

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31.10.
#473
Passage Kinos Wintergarten
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31.10.2024
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Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Želimir Žilnik
Cinematographer
Karpo Aćimović Godina
Editor
Kaća Stefanović
Producer
Neoplanta film
Sound
Dušan Ninkov

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Main Contact
Sarita Matijević Žilnik
matijevic.zilnik@gmail.com
Retrospective
Filmstill Chile
Chile
Juan Forch, Jörg Herrmann
Exiled Chilean Juan Forch and Dresden-based silhouette film specialist Jörg Herrmann call for battle against Pinochet and his imperialist allies: with singing and organ music.
Filmstill Chile
Filmstill Chile

Chile

Chile
Juan Forch, Jörg Herrmann
Retrospective
Animated Film
GDR
1975
2 minutes
German,
Spanish
Subtitles: 
English
No Premiere

In 1973, General Pinochet, with the support of the US secret service, staged a coup against the democratically elected Marxist-Socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende. Pinochet’s military junta murdered and tortured their way across the country. Juan Forch, Santiago-born journalist and filmmaker, managed to escape the terror via Mexico to the GDR and continued his opposition work from here until his return in 1979: as a director at the DEFA Studio for Animation Film in Dresden. With silhouette film specialist Jörg Herrmann he realised this animated agitation miniature, in which the dictator and his allies dance to the caustic artist’s tune – and to organ music.


Sylvia Görke

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30.10.
#373
Passage Kinos Wintergarten
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30.10.2024
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Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Juan Forch, Jörg Herrmann
Script
Juan Forch
Cinematographer
Peter Pohler
Editor
Heidrun Sünderhauf
Producer
DEFA-Studio für Trickfilme
Sound
Horst Philipp
Score
Addy Kurth
Animation
Juan Forch
Animation Technique
Silhouettes, Collage

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Retrospective
Filmstill Something Self Explanatory (15x)
Something Self Explanatory (15x)
Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky
An educational film about the Marxist vocabulary of commodity and labour, wages and labour power, exchange and use value - demonstrated with political stance and aesthetic actions.
Filmstill Something Self Explanatory (15x)

Something Self Explanatory (15x)

Eine Sache, die sich versteht (15x)
Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky
Retrospective
Documentary Film
FRG
1971
64 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English
No Premiere

This Marxist education offensive cast into actions and images is part of a bigger cycle of so-called educational films that, following Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the didactic experimental play, use lucid illustration to fill abstract terms with practical meaning. In fifteen learning unites, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky address the basic concepts of Karl Marx’s main political work, “Capital”, discussing a section that, according to their own statements, they do not consider self explanatory. “The intention is to make a person who is walking think about walking so that he falls down,” as the two filmmakers noted about their project. It remains to be seen whether such a fall also makes the penny drop among the audience.


Sylvia Görke

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31.10.
#473
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31.10.2024
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Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky
Cinematographer
David Slama, Carlos Bustamante
Editor
Hasso Nagel
Producer
Larabel Film Harun Farocki
Sound
Johannes Beringer

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Retrospective
Filmstill [Opening speech for the retrospective “Cuban Documentary Film”] [excerpt]
[Opening speech for the retrospective “Cuban Documentary Film”] [excerpt]
Santiago Álvarez
Cuban documentarist Santiago Álvarez speaks to GDR cultural officials and the “fighting” youth of Leipzig: about documentary film as a weapon against imperialism and colonialism.
Filmstill [Opening speech for the retrospective “Cuban Documentary Film”] [excerpt]

[Opening speech for the retrospective “Cuban Documentary Film”] [excerpt]

[Eröffnungsrede zur Retrospektive „Kubanischer Dokumentarfilm“] [Ausschnitt]
Santiago Álvarez
Retrospective
Acoustical Film
GDR
1974
15 minutes
German,
Spanish
Subtitles: 
German (Overvoice)
No Premiere

In 1974, the GDR and the Leipzig festival celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution with the “Cuban Documentary Film” retrospective. Santiago Álvarez, vigorous propagandist of documentary film as an art of war against imperialist cinema entertainment, spoke at soporific length at the opening.
One wonders whether, in addition to the invited officials, the “fighting” youth of Leipzig addressed by Álvarez were present at the event. The speech has survived only as an audio document, the images must be imagined. The recording was commissioned by the State Film Documentation, a government agency that was to preserve GDR reality for the future. In 1974, no one in the room could have imagined that this future would one day take place without the GDR.


Sylvia Görke

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29.10.
#273
Passage Kinos Wintergarten
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29.10.2024
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Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Santiago Álvarez
Producer
Staatliche Filmdokumentation

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Bundesarchiv
Retrospective
Filmstill Color Test. The Red Flag
Color Test. The Red Flag
Gerd Conradt
He carries a flag, and that flag is red: In 1968 Holger Meins takes part in this student flag run in West Berlin, in 1970 he joins the RAF and goes into hiding.
Filmstill Color Test. The Red Flag

Color Test. The Red Flag

Farbtest. Die Rote Fahne
Gerd Conradt
Retrospective
Documentary Film
FRG
1968
13 minutes
without dialogue
Subtitles: 
None
No Premiere

An exercise on “colour” in Michael Ballhaus’s class at the DFFB in West Berlin went down in the history of cinema and subversion. In retrospect, this silent miniature became the harried document of a movement of departure that was to grow criminal powers. It was shot on 18 January 1968, five years after JFK’s statement of bloc affiliation, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” just before the murder of Benno Ohnesorg, a few months before the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke. Director-in-training Gerd Conradt and fourteen fellow students and friends organised a relay race to the Schöneberg town hall to raise the red flag there. The final leg was run by cinematography student Holger Meins, who was to become a terrorist with the Red Army Faction and starved himself to death in Wittlich prison in 1974.


Sylvia Görke

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02.11.
#673
Passage Kinos Wintergarten
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02.11.2024
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#673
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Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Gerd Conradt
Cinematographer
Charles Völsen
Producer
DFFB Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin

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Retrospective
Filmstill For the Palestinians
For the Palestinians
Edna Politi
1974, Palestinian reality in Israel and the West Bank, economic and political oppression – documented by an Israeli who wants to make a convincing appeal: the urgent need for dialogue.
Filmstill For the Palestinians

For the Palestinians

Für die Palästinenser
Edna Politi
Retrospective
Documentary Film
FRG
1973
85 minutes
Arabic,
German,
Hebrew
Subtitles: 
German (Overvoice), German
No Premiere

Words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish open this film: “I do not hate people, I do not assault anyone, but if I get hungry, I eat the flesh of my usurper. Beware, beware of my hunger, and of my anger.” This is followed by the title, then the subtitle: “An Israeli reports.” Her name is Edna Politi; she was born in Lebanon, emigrated to Israel and was accepted into the German Film and Television Academy in West Berlin in 1971. Politi’s student film is explanatory: Where does the Palestinian rage, the desperation come from? Soberly and carefully, she compiles everyday observations, facts and figures to draw attention to the mechanisms of the economic and political disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people. Her aim is to convince, not persuade.


Sylvia Görke

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01.11.
#573
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01.11.2024
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Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Edna Politi
Script
Edna Politi
Cinematographer
Edna Politi
Editor
Edna Politi
Producer
DFFB Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin
Sound
Gad Freudenthal
Score
Mohammed Askari

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Retrospective
Filmstill Hello Cubans
Hello Cubans
Agnès Varda
The grande dame of French Nouvelle Vague spent the turn of the year 1961/62 in Cuba. She came back to Europe with a photo film full of cha-cha-cha and cheerful socialism.
Filmstill Hello Cubans

Hello Cubans

Salut les Cubains
Agnès Varda
Retrospective
Documentary Film
France,
Cuba
1963
30 minutes
French
Subtitles: 
English
No Premiere

At the turn of 1961/62, Agnès Varda travelled to Cuba and saw a country that integrated Marx and Lenin into the everyday life of the Caribbean. Cha-cha-cha was part of it, but also cars à l’américaine. At her Parisian animation stand, Varda animated the black and white photos she had brought back home in an almost jaunty photo film. Chris Marker, her close friend from the Rive Gauche circle of the French Nouvelle Vague, had just paved the way for this cinematic form. They also shared an enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution – and finally even a bit of Leipzig festival experience: In 1964, Varda’s moving photo montage won the Silver Dove. Despite or because of the subtle irony with which she looks at this somewhat improvised socialism?


Sylvia Görke

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29.10.
#273
Passage Kinos Wintergarten
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29.10.2024
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Director
Agnès Varda
Editor
Janine Verneau
Producer
Société Nouvelle Pathé-Cinéma, Ciné-Tamaris

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Ciné-Tamaris
Retrospective
Filmstill I Am Ernst Busch
I Am Ernst Busch
Sebastian Eschenbach, Peter Voigt
A disciple of Brecht, multi-artist Peter Voigt has mounted a filmic memorial to perhaps the strongest voice of anti-fascist propaganda: Ernst Busch, made of songs, stone and anger.
Filmstill I Am Ernst Busch

I Am Ernst Busch

Ich bin Ernst Busch
Sebastian Eschenbach, Peter Voigt
Retrospective
Documentary Film
Germany
2000
58 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
None
No Premiere

Ernst Busch was hyped as an icon of the anti-fascist class struggle – by the GDR and perhaps a little by himself. He rose to fame as a film and theatre star in the 1920s and never made a secret of his leftist views. His history as a morale-boosting singer for the Communist International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, his history of persecution under the Nazi regime made him a myth with an immaculate revolutionary pedigree. The portrait dedicated to him by the multi-talented director-poet Peter Voigt reveals the history of Busch’s downfall, for he also regularly went to battle against the SED party bureaucracy. Flattery, disparagement, withdrawn and re-issued party membership books … Sometimes the GDR was maddening.


Sylvia Görke

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30.10.
#373
Passage Kinos Wintergarten
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30.10.2024
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Director
Sebastian Eschenbach, Peter Voigt
Script
Peter Voigt
Cinematographer
Christian Lehmann, Gunther Becher
Editor
Thomas Malz

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Main Contact
Jürgen Jeserigk
info@medienkontor.de
Retrospective
Filmstill The Mad Masters
The Mad Masters
Jean Rouch
Followers of the Hauka cult in Ghana enter the bodies of the colonialists and go mad to European marching music. An ethnofiction that remains disturbing and controversial to this day.
Filmstill The Mad Masters

The Mad Masters

Les maîtres fous
Jean Rouch
Retrospective
Documentary Film
France
1955
28 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None
No Premiere

This still controversial ethnofiction is one of Jean Rouch’s most famous films. It stages followers of the Hauka cult in Ghana incorporating their colonial masters to marching music imported from Europe. The disturbing work was released at the same time as the first Leipzig festival year, but would have gone beyond the scope of the “Culture and Documentary Film Week”. This was because the festival did not adopt an international focus until 1960. Nevertheless, Rouch floats through Leipzig’s festival history as an inspiring genius: He is regarded as the founder of Cinéma-Vérité, a documentary concept that was pursued with great interest in Leipzig, and he irritated the colonial gaze by encouraging African filmmakers to determine the images of their continent themselves.


Sylvia Görke

Contains mentions of racism

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30.10.
#373
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30.10.2024
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Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jean Rouch
Cinematographer
Jean Rouch
Editor
Suzanne Baron
Producer
Les Films de la Pléiade
Sound
André Cotin

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Les Films du Jeudi