DOK Leipzig director Christoph Terhechte came to the festival after working for many years at the Berlinale Forum. He loved his time in Berlin but points out that the festival is “huge.” By contrast, Leipzig is on a much more manageable scale.
“Leipzig has just the right size to create a very convivial atmosphere where people can actually meet. Filmmakers can meet each other and audiences and filmmakers can meet,” he enthuses about an event, running 8-15 October, where delegates often run into each other in the market square. “It’s big enough to be of interest internationally and also small enough to create this conviviality which makes it attractive…there is enough room to breathe and ask yourself questions.”
Arndt Ginzel’s documentary White Angel – The End of Marinka which opens this year’s event wasn’t originally intended to be a film at all. As Terhechte explains, director Ginzel is an award-winning journalist commissioned by ZDF to make a TV mini-series about the evacuation of the small town of Marinka in war-torn Ukraine in the autumn last year.
Ginzel showed some of his material to Michael Kölmel who runs Weltkino Distribution in Leipzig. “Kölmel immediately saw the potential for a film for the big screen in this. He showed me excerpts and I totally agreed,” the festival director recalls. ZDF agreed to postpone their broadcast until spring of next year to give the film version of Ginzel’s material a theatrical and festival window.
Terhechte is at pains to point out that this isn’t just another Ukrainian war doc. “It really focuses on what the war does to the population of this place. It’s really about what happens when people suddenly find themselves in the middle of the war, what it does to people.”
The DOK Leipzig boss was especially struck by the footage Ginzel shot several months after the evacuation of the town in which he interviews townsfolk, inviting them “to reflect on the very images in which they are the protagonists.”
“I thought it was the perfect film to open the festival – something which is extremely meaningful, contemporary and yet cinematic,” he says. “The timing was just right. I think it is outstanding what the film is showing and having someone from Leipzig to open our festival is another wonderful coincidence that I just couldn’t pass.”
In the wake of the pandemic, Terhechte believes there has been a shift in documentary makers’ preoccupations. “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,” he suggests of the move away from the many intimate and inward-looking projects made during the Covid period.
Another trend is that filmmakers are “focusing a lot on the past. There are numerous examples in the programme this year where filmmakers look at events in the past to deal with events in the present. I think that is a wonderful way for filmmakers to do more than just the observational documentary.”
Examples he cites include The Mother Of All Lies in which young Moroccan filmmaker Asmae el Moudir uses models and puppets to probe into uncomfortable events in the past. Another example of this trend of looking back in time to make sense of the present is Lucie Dèche’s Mamie 44 (in International Competition) about the filmmaker’s grandfather who died in France in 1944. The family mythology is that he was killed by the Nazis during the occupation, but it turns out that he was actually executed by the Resistance because he was a collaborator.
Meanwhile, Sarah Mallégol’s Kumva – Which Comes From Silence contemplates the horror of the Rwandan genocide by looking at the current lives of those who were kids when it happened. It brings together both children of perpetrators and children of victims.
The festival boss notes that there are several films relying very heavily on archive. Among these is El Shatt – A Blueprint For Utopia from Ivan Ramljak which tells the strange story of how a model was created for an ideal socialist Yugoslavian community in the desert in Egypt.
Terhechte took up the reins at DOK Leipzig at the start of 2020, just a few months before Covid hit. “What was good about Covid and this interruption in our lives, for some time we could not just do business as usual…we had to reflect on what was essential about the festival. We had to reflect on different ways of bringing the films to the audiences. I am kind of grateful for that. Even though the pandemic was a disaster for many and has had numerous victims, it had that [more positive] effect,” the festival director reflects. “[But] now we are going back to business as normal. Often, unfortunately, we see that we haven’t learned much from it.”
Covid issues are at the forefront of Austrian master Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s The Standstill which looks at how the different waves of the pandemic hit Vienna. Terhechte describes it as “a perfect film” to watch now that the pandemic is in the rearview mirror.
This year sees Terhechte fulfils a longstanding ambition. For the first time, DOK Leipzig will have an international competition for animated film. This combines features and shorts. “It’s the first time that a feature length [animated] film can win a Golden Dove,” the festival director explains. “We are the only major documentary film festival in the world that also has animated films.”
The same rigorous selection criteria apply to the animated titles as to the live action docs. “What is important to us is the artistic value of the films, not just content but also form. The second is their relevance in society. Of course, in animation, you still have an element of fiction that you only have in certain documentary hybrid films – but it was important for us to have animated films that are rooted in reality.”
Terhechte rhapsodises about Isabel Herguera’s Sultana’s Dream, an animated feature screening out of competition (having recently showed in San Sebastián). “The animation itself is so multi-faced, so beautifully drawn,” he enthuses of a project which evokes the dream-like kingdom ‘Ladyland,’ a place where women are in charge and men are kept where they belong – locked up indoors. “I was in awe when I saw it. It is probably one of the best animated films of the whole year…it’s an example of the artistic standards animation can actually achieve.”
Knit’s Island, a French animated feature which is in competition, is shot entirely within a video game engine. The images are generated by the filmmakers playing DayZ. “They shot hundreds of hours inside this video game…But they also get behind their avatars and start talking to the real people who are other players in the game and interact with them,” Terhechte explains the ingenious concept behind the project.
Other animated titles in the competition, for example Joël Vaudreuil’s coming-of-age film When Adam Changes, and Tender Metalheads by Joan Tomàs Monfort, Carlos Pérez-Reche and Juanjo Sáez, about young friends who bond through a shared love of heavy metal, are more traditional in style.
“I am not at all into heavy metal but I found the film extremely convincing and totally empathetic towards its characters,” the festival boss adds of the second title.
DOK Leipzig has shuffled its dates this year and is running earlier than normal, before the festivals of Doclisboa and Ji.hlava. Next year, the event will move back into a later October slot. “There is no perfect solution,” Terhechte says of the never-ending struggle to find the perfect place in the documentary calendar.
