In its 64th edition, the DOK Leipzig festival celebrates intimacy with documentary and animated films.
Documentary and animation films have been celebrated in Leipzig for sixty-four years, and now there is even a new word for the most popular contributions – the “docbuster”. As if some director or filmmaker who is represented here was dreaming the dream of a box-office hit. In fact, many films were overbooked, even though – unlike in September at the Venice Festival – all cinema seats are allowed to be occupied again. What is usually a stress factor for festival travelers, worrying about catching a ticket, this time aroused hope among the approximately eleven hundred accredited people: As hesitantly as many cultural offers have been accepted since the easing, one also has to worry about the future of cinema . But film festivals are obviously being accepted again, at least if they are so firmly located in their city “DOK Leipzig”.
Festival director Christoph Terhechte had to contest his first festival edition last year without a single spectator on site. Today the online offer is a second mainstay of the festival and can be seen for two weeks after the end on Sunday. This is good for everyone who has to stay at home, but of course also a pact with the devil: The booming streaming services are considered the grave digger of the cinema, but on the other hand they are helping filmmakers in the documentary film sector in particular to find a new sales market.
As the times suggest, documentary film work is currently often taking place indoors. That doesn’t have to be due to Corona alone: In the past few years, East Asian cinema in particular has developed its own culture of documentary chamber play, which in the case of the Chinese Wei Deng could also have something to do with circumventing censorship. His feature film debut “Father” portrays the story of a society from the microcosm of a family that never ceases to sell oppression as progress.
“To hell with Deng Xiaoping,” curses the director’s 86-year-old grandfather after revealing a family tragedy to the other of the two fathers in the film, his son. His sister was “aborted” at nine months as a viable baby, as required by the one-child policy. The old man himself was almost abandoned by his mother when he went blind as a child. On the mediation of a doctor, he was then married to a girl who was also blind, a salvation for both of them. In a discreet semi-darkness, this heartbreaking film roams through the nights of a life, but above all the astonishing self-determination in all tragedy: the old man is still in demand in his profession as a fortune teller, and his son is still looking for his advice in his professional decisions.
Festival director Terhechte, who previously headed the Berlinale Forum, presented a program of the highest quality. The Israeli opening film “The Rhine flows into the Mediterranean” by Offer Avnon transferred one of the most important debates of the present to the sphere of art and the screen: It is the retrospective of a Jew on ten years in Germany, where he used the “beautiful language of the former Arch enemy ”and the Shoah cannot forget for a day.
Conversations, still lifes, city and landscape pictures collected over several years lead into a ghostly in-between – in the midst of the poles of anti and philosemitism, denial and overemphasis. This, too, is a film that, with its artful, contrapuntal entanglement of image and text, belongs on the big screen. And the cinema and its audience involuntarily welded together in a common discourse.
In Leipzig, however, one would like to see a little more weight for the animation film, this second pillar of the traditional festival, which today seems a bit like an appendage to the documentary film. What a treasure are the two minutes that the Austrian Oscar winner Virgil Widrich sent into the competition.
After Oskar Salomonowitz, the filmmaker’s 12-year-old son, died in an accident last year, he discovered a flip book in the child’s desk. The father went to the retreat to complete the grandiose animation in the spirit of his son – a two-minute superhero story and a monument to the imagination. He also found a sadly optimistic title in the child’s notes: “There is precisely enough time”.
