Last week we sent PAN reporter Steve Bergson to Leipzig in Germany for the DOK Leipzig festival – here’s his report from the event:
• DOK Leipzig, held every autumn, is unique among festivals worldwide in offering a combination of documentary and animated film. During the week-long festival, they show about 250 short and long films and extended reality (XR) works in Leipzig.
Beacons in Saxony
There’s something endearingly home made about DOK Leipzig as an event to celebrate documentary. This year, among the presentation of some 225 films, there were more than a few mishaps like broken projectors or damaged film copies snagging in the projection gate but with the DOK Stream online service as backup, there was no excuse for missing titles you could select to view. As a place, the old East German city is endlessly interesting and vibrant in the autumn – colourful leaf fall in the elegant streets of the centre surrounded by the sometimes bleak post GDR, post industrial landscapes of the resurgent but still gritty Saxon city. With its grand buildings and wastelands, it’s not unlike Sheffield, which holds a similar festival but in the summer.
The films on offer this year were hugely varied, though the number of venues seemed a little fewer and the balance of animation to live action more tilted towards a very liberal definition of documentary. The existence of hybrid forms is of course nothing new and generally to be welcomed, though it inevitably throws up philosophical questions that haunt the form – even more of course with the rise of Gen-AI. A film like ‘Life after Siham’ which is intensely biographical in its examination of one family in Egypt over several decades, makes clever use of feature film clips, home movies and at times, strikingly jarring graphics to convey the subtle story. In a very post modernist style it makes no pretence to be a transparent narrative, but it seems all the stronger for that. The short films in a programme such as ‘Rauch und Schall’ ranged between powerful audio over dark night time shots to convey the terror of the illegal migrants’ experience as they try to breach borders, through to ping pong simulations illustrating changing social and political times, and on to vivid animation about the differences in the attitude of different generations among the civilian population of Kiev as they attempt desperately to defend their lives from the effects of the Russian missiles and munition bearing drones.
These events have to be very much about audience interaction naturally; otherwise why travel across Europe to attend? The Q&As this year were all really interesting even where the always informed and enthusiastic moderators were asking most of the questions if the audience was quiet, either possibly from their closeness to the films they’ve just seen or an understandable hesitation about tackling some of the difficult issues raised. Most of the filmmakers commented on the parlous state of documentary making worldwide with funding challenges often preventing films being made or shown where they need to be. A title like ‘Coexistence My Ass’ about Noemi Shuster-Eliassi, a liberal Israeli comedian, raised a lot of very thorny questions about the European attitude to the Middle East and Israel in particular, especially as the film came from the viewpoint of someone who fervently believed in a two state solution to Palestine….often in the face of vicious criticism both in Israel and abroad. The irony at the heart of this project – tellingly the film is not expected to get distributed in Germany – is that it unspools as an essentially disparate collage of scenes filmed over several years, around an engaging personality but hard to see reaching any conclusion. Of course October 7th provides the grim finale even though that notable historic event assaulted the whole liberal notion of Arab and Jew living peacefully side by side, so it finished on a note of despair at the big picture level but optimism on an individual one, providing quite a thoughtful conclusion – if you could call it that.
The feeling about the festival as a whole among those attending seemed to be that there were not enough titles like this that grasped such hot political nettles – at least enough even to take the sting out of a key issue. Perhaps this is asking too much of production in today’s often risk averse climate. With 53,000 people viewing this number of films, any individual inevitably only has a limited window on the scope of the vision offered, but at times, the programme seemed to lack a focal point or big headline grabbers. Possibly that is a reflection of the state of documentary currently – and credit has to go to retiring festival director Christoph Terhechte for steering this 68th edition of the event through very troubled times in the world. He well knows documentary has to reflect this turmoil while at the same time maintaining an “entertainment” value that can appeal to audiences across generations. In its quest for truthful representation, it might have to resort to multiple hybrid forms which undercut – possibly even jettison – the conventions. This could ultimately prove to be a bad thing only for the purists who believe in an authenticity impossible to achieve. Like a map imagined by Borges, only real life on the ground can look anything like that – and even then any recording of it always has an angle or viewpoint.
It is hard to see documentary festivals are anything other than curious beasts because always stalking them is this compulsion to find outlets – and eyeballs – for the stories and visions they showcase. It’s impossible to deny that if films are shown only in places like Leipzig or Sheffield, they have failed utterly. The outreach has to extend into the mainstream to be effective. You have to hope that the dispersal inherent – at least technically – in digital distribution will somehow succeed in laying down realistic pathways for these kinds of titles to be seen by a wider audience. There’s clearly an appetite for them. Nobody would say documentary is in rude health but the “keepers of the frame” bringing their output to such events as this are still carrying a valuable torch for an important form.
Steve Bergson in Leipzig for PAN.
Related on PAN:
November 12 2024: Event Report: Folkestone and Leipzig documentary festivals round up