Leipzig 23

Andreas Hartmann and Arata Mori’s D-Facto Motion Works-in-Progress Prize-winning project tells of the Japanese phenomenon of ‘night moving’ companies that help people to vanish without a trace. “From the beginning I was kind of very fascinated with this idea of the possibility to restart your life, but also very intrigued about the consequences of leaving everything behind,” co-director Hartmann told the Leipzig audience.

DOK Leipzig announced 10 October its DOK Industry award winners. These were the Saxon Award for the Best Documentary Project by a Female Director (€5000), the Current Time TV Award (€2000) and the Unifrance Doc Award (all awarded to DOK Co-Pro Market projects). The D-Facto Motion Works-in-Progress Prize was handed out to the winning project within DOK Preview Germany while Kurzfilm Agentur Hamburg Award was given to the winning project in DOK Short n’ Sweet.

A fascinating and impressively mounted delve into a long-forgotten piece of Communist history, El Shatt – A Blueprint for Utopia tells the story of El Shatt in Egypt where, in 1944, and based on a deal between the Yugoslavian partisans led by Tito and the British allies, a piece of desert became not only a refugee camp for the families of anti-fascist fighters from Dalmatia, but also where a model was created for the future Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The astute, elegant and insightful observational gaze of Austrian documentary-maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter is focussed on Covid-1 and lockdown in his new film The Standstill (Stillstand). The documentary offers a haunting and thoughtful examination on this dark and challenging period as it impacted on his home country of Austria, and Vienna in particular.

October 9 sees the presentation to industry of eight new German documentary projects, either completed or as works-in-progress, and therefore poised for international roll-out. One of the projects will be awarded the D-Facto Motion Works-in-Progress Prize, which will provide post-production services valued at €10,000.

“This year, it is quite obvious that filmmakers have gone out again, looking further…it was possible again after the lockdowns to go out into the world,” the Leipzig boss tells BDE about one of the trends within his 2023 programme. He also fulfils a longstanding ambition in 2023. For the first time, DOK Leipzig will host an International Competition for animated film.

On the face of it, the images we see in the post-war home films of Rose, the grandma of German director Annika Mayer, reflect nothing other than domestic bliss, good health and affluence, all set against a backdrop of the country’s economic recovery. But the footage we see hides 23 years of domestic violence, which is revealed by 90-year-old Rose as she is shown once more the Super-8 chronicle of her earlier life. The director talks to BDE.

Doc, fiction and animation luminaries include Radu Jude, Anne Isensee, Steven Markovitz and Serpil Turhan, who will deliberate over films in the International Documentary, International Animation and German competitions. A jury of film buffs, cineastes and festival goers will decide on films in the audience Competition. Seven Golden Doves and two Silver Doves will go to films in the four competitions.

The competition films for the 66th edition of DOK Leipzig have been finalized with a total of 71 films, including 35 world premieres, competing for the Golden and Silver Doves in 2023. “Quite a few films made during the pandemic had a personal angle. This year, the films have gone back to looking at broader societal and political themes – partly in order to understand what’s going on at the moment and explore how we can work towards a different future,” underlines festival director Christoph Terhechte.

A raft of films in the Panorama section reflect the current state of a region under the influence of Russia, while the Focus: Post-1991 Slovenian Documentary Films section will screen outstanding Slovenian films made over the past three decades. 5x5 Shorts from the East is being presented together with an array of CEE partners while the Doc Alliance Award will screening 3 long and 3 short docs from the region.