DOK Leipzig Artistic Director Christoph Terhechte has no doubts that Claire Simon’s latest movie, Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students, is the perfect choice to launch his final festival at the helm.
“A good reason for choosing this film is that Claire Simon is one of the world’s leading documentarists,” Terhechte declares. He adds an even more important reason for programming it. The documentary, about young people responding to the works of the Nobel prize winning French author, “shows in an exemplary fashion how important culture is in our lives, and how it shapes us as human beings. It’s about literature, of course, but it could be about cinema. In these times, when culture institutions are being asked to spend less, and effectively reach fewer people, it is important to insist the work that we are doing is fundamental. The film shows what culture does with young people and how it shapes their future. For me, it is the film for the moment.”
The 68th edition of the festival, running 27 October to 2 November 2025, bears its Artistic Director’s firm imprint.
One important change made by Terhechte, after his appointment was announced in late 2019, was to prioritise animation. The festival now has its own international competition for animated film.
“I insist that animation is a very helpful, useful supplement to documentary. Animation reaches parts of our brain and talks about things that are so hard to put in real life images…films that combine animation and documentary can reach levels that are really hard to attain when you are limited to images from the camera.”
Terhechte acknowledges that animation still sometimes struggles for “acceptance.” There is ingrained snobbery which still causes many people to regard the form as “children’s stuff.”
“But I think animation should be considered seriously along with documentary, with fiction, with experimental cinema. To me, it is just another way of reaching people’s minds…I am very proud of giving animation this standing that it has now, and I hope my successor will build up on that.” Earlier this week Aleksandra (Ola) Staszel was confirmed as the festival’s next artistic director.
As happened last year, DOK Leipzig has again been swamped with a huge number of submissions, numbering over 3000. One trend that Terhechte has noticed is that filmmakers are becoming yet more engaged with the outside world. In the post-pandemic period, a lot of the work being offered was inward-looking and deeply personal. That, it seems, has begun to change.
“We didn’t draw up any statistics. There are still films of course that are looking in the mirror or describing what goes on within the filmmaker’s four walls. This has always been an important part of documentary…,[but] this is the year when there is a noticeable change.”
In his six years at the helm, Terhechte has kept the festival on a sound financial footing despite the ongoing cuts in public spending in the arts and the turmoil caused by Covid. He has also introduced the special Panorama on Central and Eastern European documentary. He notes that the programme again this year has some very strong Ukrainian titles, among them A Simple Soldier and The Birds Are Silent.
Meanwhile, another sidebar he championed, Camera Lucida, continues to focus on artistically challenging work.
Terhechte has put together his final edition in his usual painstaking way. “It has obviously not been just another year because I was aware that this is the last edition but the process was exactly the same.”
The only slight shift was that more of his time was spent on administration than normal as the festival tried to cope with continuing budget cuts. It frustrates him that the German government is prepared to borrow billions to invest in “infrastructure” but that culture is never included.
“Of course, culture needs an infrastructure. The festivals themselves are infrastructure. Festivals need more infrastructure….it is clear that cities are going to going to keep funding opera houses and theatres but nobody is really invested in making sure cinemas will continue to exist.”
The budget for this year’s edition is slightly less than for last year. (It’s around €2.5m). However, the funding for “inclusion,” which enabled the festival to show films for hearing-impaired audiences and provide audio-descriptions for blind spectators, was lost. A crowd funding campaign made up some of the budget that was lost but this was still “a big blow,” Terhechte says.
Nor can the festival be as generous as it would like to be when it comes to guests. Filmmakers attending DOK Leipzig have to pay part of their expenses, “not an ideal situation for a festival that strives for an international standing.”
Terhechte warns that cutting funding for filmmakers to travel to Leipzig could affect the programme in the long term. ‘Maybe with the films that we invited this year, the filmmakers all say they’re coming, but with their next film, they may say oh, there’s another festival much cheaper for us to go to – next time we should submit there.”
Over his career, Terhechte has worked as head of the Berlinale Forum and as artistic director of the Marrakech Festival as well as at Leipzig. “For me, part of the concept in all three cases has been that I wanted to programme for an audience that is as wide as possible…in the case of the Forum, I didn’t just want to do something for the intellectuals who mostly see films to apply their highbrow concepts of art. I wanted to have anything interesting and surprising and that could be entertaining too.”
During his Berlinale days, Terhechte was programming everything from Korean horror to experimental work from James Benning. “I wanted to have that range. This is something I have tried to apply to Marrakech and to Leipzig as well – and I think successfully.”
In this year’s programme, he points out, the festival is showing US director Debra Granik’s Conbody vs Everybody, about a former drug dealer trying to go straight. “I know it’s a challenge for audiences here to see a film that is five and a half hours…but I think it’s important to have films like that. On the other hand, we have the typical 80- or 90-minute documentaries [in the Audience Competition] where the logline is enough to convince people to see them. We need variety and I can’t just impose my own taste on the audience.”
As he prepares for his final edition at the helm, Terhechte makes it clear that his passion for documentary remains as fervent as ever. “They’re about the ‘real,’” he emphasises. “We are talking about films that are meaningful to the lives we lead, and obviously there is an emotional connection as well as an intellectual connection. If I may say so, I’m not an academic…my approach involves both the sentimental and the intellectual!”
