44th Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animation Films (DOKfilm)

As befitted the occasion, the 44th Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animation Films (16 - 21 October 2001) opened with a moment of somber reflection on the tragic events of September 11th. Further, the poignant memorial was delivered by Friedrich Magirius, the Leipziger Evangelical Superintendent who had played a major role in the Wende events at Leipzig in November of 1989. Then Fred Gehler welcomed the DOKfilm faithful to the brand new CineStar multiplex, with four screens on the top floor booked by the festival. These, in turn, are complemented by the four screens at the Passage Kinos in the Jägerhofpassage (opened three years ago), where the festival maintains its year-around office. Thus the Capitol Kino, the festival flagship for the past four decades, is no more ­ and a chapter in DEFA film history, sometimes visionary, often factious, always utopian, has closed. (See KINO 64/65, our special East German Film issue published in 1997, for an all-embracing interview with Ronald Trisch, the former Leipzig director.)
       The 44th DOKfestival, traditionally devoted as much to animation as to documentary, opened with a standing ovation ­ for Hungarian animator (and jury member) Ferenc Cakó, who gave a live demonstration of his fantastic »magic-sand« skills. With a light flurry of his hand to the joyous strains of Vivaldi, Cakó »navigated« sand across a glass surface that is lit from beneath and beamed directly onto the movie screen. The audience was bewitched by clouds that changed to birds on the wing, that mingled with the flow of waves, that blended into the profile of a young girl whose hair was blowing in the wind, and so on. Cakó ­ an award-winning animation artist who works equally well with paper (The Chair, 1978), clay (Ad Astra, 1982), puppets (Vision, 1999), and sand (Stones, 2000) ­ was honored with an eight-film retrospective.

       Planet TV, the European channel for documentary films, annually promotes its presence at Leipzig by displaying an advertisement on the back cover of the DOKfestival catalogue that lists past award winners that were later aired on the channel. This year, Planet took justified pride in announcing a forthcoming »Best of GDR Documentary« retrospective ­ namely, DEFA documentary films dating from 1954 to 1991 under the thematic headings »Alltag - Aufbruch - Abschied« (Everyday - Uprising - Farewell). Petra Dietzel, Planet’s press representative, invited Volker Koepp, Helke Misselwitz, and Andreas Voigt ­ each a veteran East German documentarist with a distinguished Leipzig DOKfilm past ­ to the nearby Polish Institute for an open-ended discussion on the retro moderated by publicist Ralf Schenk under the title »Pictures of a Vanished Country«.
       As for this year’s Planet Audience Prize, it was awarded to Stanislaw Mucha’s Absolut Warhola (Germany), an absurd, hilarious, warm-hearted sketch about the director’s visit to the Slovak homeland of the Andy Warhol family. The jury declaration hit the nail on the head: »The Planet Audience Prize is awarded to a film that captivates with its humor and blithe spirit. Some lovable people from a tucked-away corner of Europe are introduced in a droll, tongue-in-cheek manner. We are offered a glimpse of a rural Ruthenian community ­ in the triangle where Poland, Slovakia, and the Ukraine meet, the place where American pop-art icon Andrej Warhola (Andy Warhol) had his family roots.« Filmed in and around the village of Mikova in eastern Slovakia ­ where an authentic (Europe’s only?) »Pop Art Museum«, stuffed with paintings and memorabilia sent by Andy’s brother John in Pittsburgh can be found ­ Absolut Warhola also received the Don Quixote Prize of the Cine-Clubs and Best Camera Award »because Susanne Schüle’s intelligent, retiring camera work captures emotions in images beyond the spoken word.«

       Given that Leipzig’s forte has always been the timely, provocative, sociopolitical documentary, this year’s crop was particularly remarkable. Half of the 19 films in competition well deserved recognition, although it should be noted that the »film documentary« is being increasingly replaced by »video documentation«. The international jury awarded the Golden Dove for Best Long Documentary to Anat Even and Ada Ushpiz’s Asurot (Detained) (Israel) ­ »for its exact observation of a microcosm in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This portrait of three women in a doubly besieged condition by an occupying army and a male society allows in a hopeless situation for a moment in which the utopia of a self-determined life shines through.« Since the household of these three Palestinian widows includes eleven children and lies directly on the border to an Israeli settlement in the heart of Hebron, the Israeli army uses the roof as a lookout position ­ an absurd situation that adds pain as well as discomfort. Detained also received the Ecumenical Prize.
       The Silver Dove for Long Documentary was awarded to Sergei Loznitsa’s Poseleniye (The Settlement) (Russia), with the rather enigmatic jury declaration: »Comparable to paintings of the classic Russian school, the film’s precise images and sounds similarly bring us closer to a group of people living today on the edge of society.« A master of detailed, minimalist observation, Loznitsa possesses a fine instinct for focusing his camera imperceptibly on the revealing aspects of life in a rural settlement somewhere in Russia that appears to be cut off from society as a whole. Who are these people? Is The Settlement portraying the remnants of a kolkhoz ­ maybe a religious commune, or a labor camp? A hint of an answer is offered when Loznitsa shifts perspective from the routine of the everyday to focus on a portrait gallery, a kind of photo-iconography on peasant life today. Another documentary that raised as many questions as it gave answers was Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh’s Sacrificio (Sweden). The film deals with the martyrdom of Che Guevara as reexamined via interviews with Ciro Bustos, the key Argentinean eyewitness and Che comrade, who is now living in Uppsala; Régis Debray, the French journalist, who had joined the revolutionary leader in the Bolivian underground; and some members of the arresting Bolivian army, who have their own story to tell. Ever since Debray broke with Fidel Castro some five years ago, he ­ instead of Bustos ­ has been accused of having betrayed Che from prison shortly after their arrest by the Bolivian police in 1967. Much as in a fiction thriller, Erik Gandini first elicits from Bustos his account of Che’s last days, then goes to Normandy with this and other eyewitness accounts to confront Debray ­ who, in the end, refuses to even to address the matter. Thus the myth of Che’s martyrdom lingers on.

       Another entry that triggered pro-and-con discussion was Gerd Conradt’s Starbuck ­ Holger Meins (Germany), particularly in light of the terrorist attack of September 11th. Presented at Leipzig as a work-in-progress, Starbuck is about how Holger Meins, a talented art student and painter from Hamburg, drifted from his filmmaking classes at the newly founded Berlin Film and Television Academy (DFFB) into radical resistance and then to full membership in the RAF (Rote Armee Faktion). But it is also a absorbing chronicle of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, one that links the past with the present by seeking some answers to still disturbing questions.
       Twenty-five years after Holger Meins’s death in 1974 at the age of 33 after a prolonged hunger strike, Gerd Conradt talks to a score of eyewitnesses and colleagues: Gretchen Dutschke, Michael Ballhaus, Wolfgang Petersen, Rainer Langhans, Peter Lilienthal, Enzio Edschmid, Harun Farocki, and Wilhelm Meins (Holger’s father), to name just a few. Each brings a measure of sympathy for a committed artist who had lost his way. Of some interest, too, is how Holger Meins received his »Starbuck« code-name ­ it had been given to him in the underground by Gudrun Ensslin in reference to the coxswain on the Pequod in Herman Melville’s »Moby Dick« classic. Most important of all, Conradt leaves us with the conviction that Meins was, indeed, a gifted artist in every respect.
       Wisely, Fred Gehler programmed Starbuck ­ Holger Meins jointly with two other important documentaries that dealt with the same political era and its immediate aftermath: Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), a composite chronicle by nine West German directors on the death and burial in 1977 of members of the Baader-Meinhof Group; and Andreas Veiel’s Black Box BRD (awarded ­ and rightly so! ­ the European Documentary of the Year 2001), a parallel account of the life and death of slain terrorist Wolfgang Grams and murdered bank director Alfred Herrhausen. On the day following the screening, an extra roundtable was organized at the Polish Institute to continue the dialogue on the issues raised in Starbuck and to promote Conradt’s companion publication to the film. On hand for the spirited talk marathon before a packed house were Gerd Conradt, Rainer Langhans, Helke Sander, Volker Schloendorff, and Andreas Veiel. Slowly but surely, some of the riddles surrounding the RAF movement are being unraveled.

       Although the international jury passed on a Golden Dove for Short Documentary, a Silver Dove was awarded to Erik Pauwels’s poignant, questioning, experimental Lettre d'un cinéaste à sa fille (Letter from a Filmmaker to His Daughter) (Belgium) ­ »for its unconditional artistic autonomy, with which the filmmaker reflects his cineastic passion in the diversity of stories and forms.« Also, after an absence of many years, a Bulgarian entry, Svetoslav Draganov’s disarmingly frank Sivot e prekrasen, nali? (Life Is Wonderful, Isn't It?), was invited to the competition ­ to be awarded the MDR (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk) Film Prize. From the jury declaration: »In his story of Alexander, who dreams of a grand career as a hair-stylist to free himself from his miserable surrounding, Svetoslav Draganov succeeds at the same time to sketch a social study of a Bulgaria today in which many live on the border line of poverty and still wrestle with the ways of the past.«
       A personal favorite was another social study drawn from life: Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken’s Herr Schmidt und Herr Friedrich (Germany), programmed in a sidebar documentary section.. This amusing, bittersweet portrait of a quaint homosexual pair with a shared love for trivia (songs, trains, letters, postcards, tv-soaps, you name it) was a crowd pleaser on the gentlemen’s cherished collection of odds-and-ends alone. But when Herr Schmidt, a salesman in the west, and Herr Friedrich, a waiter in the east, recount how at the height of the cold war they literally had to move a mountain of red-tape to prove their right to share a life together, then we are taken behind the scenes of moral ethics as practiced back then in the German Democratic Republic..

       Many visitors to this year’s Leipzig festival made sure they did not miss the animation entries ­ Competition, International Panorama, Animation for Kids, »Animadoc« (films on the borderline between animation and documentary), homages and tributes ­ all neatly programmed and promoted by the able and insightful Otto Adler. If there was a flaw in the program to be noted, then it was the discouraging announcement that the competing films could be screen only once ­ thus making it difficult to catch all the highlights of a festival devoted to both documentary and animation. The Golden Dove for Best Animation was awarded to René Castillo’s Hasta los hueson (Down to the Bone) (Mexico) ­ »for the quite original and unusual clay animation, as well as the emotional and exotic manner of telling a story as reflected in the figures.« The Silver Dove went to Virgil Widrich’s Copy Shop (Austria) ­ »the film unites content and form in the massive reproduction of reality: a stimulating story told via an unusual animation technique.« Indeed, this zany spoof of xerox mania is one of the most delightfully imaginative short films seen on the festival circuit this past year.

       Last, but certainly not least, two momentous retrospectives offered discoveries and rediscoveries for even the committed cineaste and acknowledged film historian. »Memory in Pictures« glanced back at highlights programmed in retrospectives annually over the past 40 years at Leipzig, beginning in 1962 under the aegis of Wolfgang Klaue and continued today (after German unification) in collaboration with the Federal Film Archive. Altogether, 43 documentaries and animation films were screened ­ films by such masters as Dziga Vertov, John Grierson, Robert Flaherty, Joris Ivens, Jean Vigo, Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Dusan Vukotic, Guido Seeber, Luis Bunuel, Mikhail Romm, Satyajit Ray, Oskar Fischinger, Pare Lorenz, Karl Gass, and, of course, Barbara and Winfried Junge.
       Paired with this historical retro was another of the same magnitude: »The Shadow Collectors«, a survey of 45 years of Chinese ethnographic documentary films from 1956 to 2001. In view of the distressing reality that ancient cultural traditions, fading folk ceremonies, disappearing village dialects, and other vanishing ways of life have to be captured now, if they are to be saved at all for generations to come, German ethnographer Karsten Krüger deserves a vote of thanks for curating this all-embracing retrospective. He also conducted during the festival an international conference on »The Current Situation of Visual Anthropology ­ Ethnographic Filmmaking in the Peoples Republic of China and Its Future Prospects« in the Polish Institute. It was here that the efficacy of video camrecorders proved their value and worth over 35 mm and 16 mm cameras, thus forecasting a future of digital video and heralding the demise of time-honored filming techniques of the past century.

­ dh, rh