DOK Leipzig 2022

Would you send a digital version of yourself out onto the worldwide web? Not just any old avatar, but a precise copy of you, looking, speaking, laughing and moving exactly as you do. In Uncanny Me it is 26-year-old Lale who finds herself in this predicament. A calm, understated, highly personal yet thoroughly thought-provoking documentary about a dilemma created by the highly technical world we live in.

Pepe Danquart discusses his new documentary, about the international acclaimed German artist Daniel Richte. “He has a great knowledge about painting, about the history of art. He knows a lot about politics. He reads regularly the newspapers. He has a certain approach to reality,” the director tells BDE of his subject’s intelligence and very wide frame of reference.

The feature doc BOYZ, fully financed and ready for delivery at the beginning 2023, concerns three male friends on the cusp of adulthood reflecting on matters such as sexuality and masculinity. “When my little brother [a subject in the film] moved in with me, I saw how differently and how progressively they were tackling these questions, how they were able to openly talk about them,” director Cruiziat tells BDE.

Take three brilliant young female photographers living and working in the GDR in the 1980s. All are desperate for artistic freedom but all are running up against a brutal political system. And the Stasi secret police are harassing them and monitoring their every move. The artists in question are the subjects of Rebels, the world-premiering feature documentary of Pamela Meyer-Arndt, who talks to Business Doc Europe.

As British Pathé’s Simon Witter explains to Business Doc Europe on the eve of DOK Leipzig’s inaugural Archive Market, the sector continues to enjoy a boom time. “The year that just closed was the busiest we’ve ever had…We’re on a high at the moment,” he says.

The UK-based Imperial War Museums will be on the front line during DOK Leipzig’s Archive Market, representing a collection with 25,000 hours of moving images. “People think of us as a military collection but really our collection reflects life in the 20th and early 21st century,” Film Curator Fiona Kelly tells BDE. “We’re trying to get people to think of us a resource for social and cultural history as well as military history.”

You won’t find many bigger collections at DOK Leipzig Archive market than that of Sweden’s SVT Archives. It has over 400,000 hours of material in its vaults. Some of this is very recent. Some dates right back to the birth of cinema in 1896. Maria Bergmark talks Business Doc Europe through the SVT offer. “It’s not just from Sweden but from all over the world,” she says.

Elizabeth Klinck can justly be called one of the doyennes of the film archive world. She will be at DOK Leipzig for the inaugural edition of the DOK Archive Market, kicking off today, Oct 20, where she will also be chairing case studies and a masterclass. Before all that, she took time to expound on her life in the sector with BDE.  

Heinz Emigholz’ multi-layered and meditative architectural essay Slaughterhouses of Modernity juxtaposes literal modernist slaughterhouses in Argentina from the 1930s with the newly built replica of the Berliner Schloss and the triumphant works of Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani. The question is: who or what is being slaughtered here?

An impressive student film, world premiering in DOK Leipzig’s German Competition, about the Mozambican contract workers in the GDR who were forced to return after German reunification, and the children they left behind. These include children like Sarah, who has been questioning her Afro-German identity and now is taking her own child to Mozambique for a family visit.