Wrapping up for another year, the 68th edition of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animation has defied shrinking budgets and personnel reshuffles to serve up another rich program of world-class films, exhibitions, masterclass events, industry meeting and more. The festival’s outgoing director Christoph Terhechte, who steps down in January after six years at the helm, also shared a stage with his incoming successor Aleksandra “Ola” Staszel, symbolically handing over the baton in a friendly joint talk.

Balkan cinema has always been a DOK Leipzig staple, but 2025 has been a particularly strong year for the region. The festival’s main prize, the Golden Dove in the International Documentary Competition, went to Croatian director Ivan Ramljak’s Peacekeeper. Screening in Leipzig after a prize-winning run of smaller Euro-fests, this superb real-life murder thriller is a tense, gripping, moving memorial to Josip Reihl-Kir, a widely respected Croatian police chief who was assassinated in 1991 while trying to keep border conflict with neighbouring Serbia from exploding into violence. Smaller but no less accomplished, Slovenian director Srdan Kovacevic’s The Thing to be Done, a rousing snapshot of a feisty campaign group fighting for exploited and marginalised workers, picked up one of the festival’s non-statuary partnership prizes.

Films about colonialism and its lingering legacy also figured prominently this year, their heavy themes often leavened by playful, mischievous, comically quirky storytelling. The Golden Dove prize for Best Animated Feature went to Canadian brothers Seth and Peter Scriver for their wildly inventive Endless Cookie, which blends personal family memoir with lowbrow cartoon humour and deceptively sharp critique of the injustices suffered by Canada’s First Nations people. Meanwhile, Swiss director Gregor Brändli won the Silver Dove in the International Documentary section for Elephants & Squirrels, a witty post-colonial rumination on the large haul of stolen Sri Lankan artefacts currently sitting in Swiss museums.

Reflecting the wider geo-political landscape, documentaries about the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine inevitably had a strong presence in Leipzig too, from frontline reportage to deeper investigations into the wider personal and social costs of the conflict. Winning the main German Documentary Competition prize was Russian-born, Germany-based Yulia Lokshina’s Active Vocabulary, a formally bold film about a Berlin-based Russian schoolteacher who enlists her students to re-enact the traumatic experience of being censored, denounced and ultimately exiled for speaking out against the war in Ukraine.

The DOK Leipzig team have strong links to Ukraine, with the Industry section hosting events in conjunction with European broadcaster ARTE’s Generation Ukraine initiative, which has supported film-makers from the embattled nation since Russia invaded in 2022. A Simple Soldier, cinematographer Artem Ryzhykov’s emotionally raw record of both fighting and filming on the frontline in Ukraine, won the festival’s extra-curricular Film Prize Leipziger Ring. And Olga Gibelinda’s Queens of Joy brought a refreshingly rare LGBT angle to the war narrative, following three Kyiv drag queens as they find alternative ways to support their country’s self-defence efforts.

As a major central European film business hub, Leipzig is renowned for its usually frenetic Industry section. This year was no different, with around 900 tightly focussed meeting between film-makers, funders, broadcasters and sale agents squeezed into just two days. As ever, several stand-out films in the main festival program had come through this speed-dating co-production process. These included Audience Jury prize-winner Cutting Through Rocks by Iranian duo Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, and The Woman Who Poked the Leopard by Ugandan director Patience Nitumwesiga, which won two smaller awards. Both are highly assured first-time features that deliver intimate, inspirational portraits of indomitable women fighting back against repressive, patriarchal societies.

Away from the main cinemas in Leipzig’s handsome historic centre, one of the festival’s reliably great left-field treats was the annual Animation Night on Friday, which once again packed out the charmingly boho Schaubuhne Lindenfels theatre in the city’s western fringes. This year’s bill was dedicated to the short-lived golden age of the “video synthesizer”, and included some dazzling vintage examples of pre-digital glitch art alongside a woozily hypnotic electronic music set. Blurring the line between screening and concert, analogue-tech history lesson and cutting-edge video installation, this was a very DOK Leipzig moment, the kind of meticulously curated nerdcore event that no other festival can provide.

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION DOCUMENTARY FILM

Golden Dove Feature-Length Film
“Peacemaker” (Mirotvorac)
Ivan Ramljak
(Croatia)

Silver Dove Feature-Length Film
“Elephants & Squirrels”
Gregor Brandli
(Switzerland)
Read the full story here

Golden Dove Short Film
“After the Silence” (Después del silencio)
Matilde-Luna Perotti
(Canada)

Silver Dove Short Film
“String Pieces” (Garak)
Vatae Kimlee
(South Korea))

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION ANIMATED FILM

Golden Dove Feature-Length
“Endless Cookie”
Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver
(Canada)
Read the  full story here

Golden Dove Short Film
“Paradaiz”
Matea Radic
(Canada)

GERMAN COMPETITION DOCUMENTARY FILM

Golden Dove Feature-Length Film
“Active Vocabulary”
Yulia Lokshina
(Germany)
Read the  full story here

Golden Dove Short Film
“Boma a Bopa”
Jana Rothe
(Luxembourg, Germany)

Honorable Mention
“Cold Call”
Stefanie Schroeder
(Germany)

AUDIENCE COMPETITION

Golden Dove Audience Competition
“Cutting Through Rocks” (“Uzak yollar”)
Sara Khaki, Mohammadreza Eyni
(USA, Iran, Germany, Netherlands, Qatar, Chile, Canada)
Read the  full story here

PARTNERSHIP AWARDS

DEFA Sponsoring Prize
“The Woman Who Poked the Leopard”
Patience Nitumwesiga
Read the  full story here

MDR Film Prize
“Welded Together”
Anastasiya Miroschnichenko

Prize of the Interreligious Jury
“The Thing to Be Done”
Srdan Kovacevic
Read the  full story here

Young Eyes Film Award
“Fantastique”
Marjolijn Prins

FIPRESCI Prize
“The Red Moon Eclipse”
Caroline Guimbal

Mephisto 97.6 Award
“Once in a Body”
Maria Cristina Pérez

Gedanken-Aufschluss Documentary Film Award
“Sediments”
Laura Coppens
Read the  full story here

Gedanken-Aufschluss Documentary Film Award
“Clot”
Levi Stoops

Film.land.sachsen Prize
“Intersection — It’s Political”
Karoline Rossler

Film Prize Leipziger Ring
“A Simple Soldier”
Juan Camilo Cruz

Rothschild, an Israeli-German living in Berlin, who did his compulsory military service between 2007 and 2010, investigates his family’s former presence in Germany. For Rothschild, 1930s and 1940s Germany fabricated a “Jewish problem,” claiming that Jews were attempting to take over their homeland. The Palestinians, he adds, inherited “a real Jewish problem,” this time with Jewish immigrants displacing Palestinians, Rothschild argues.

He interviews his grandmother, Ruth Rothschild, who was born in Seehausen in Saxony-Anhalt. At the age of seven, with the rise of Jewish persecution at the hands of the Nazis in the 1930s, she and her family escaped to Italy, and then to Palestine before the establishment of the state of Israel. Ruth remembers her longing for the German language, traditions, and even songs. She also remembers her days as a soldier in the “Independence War,” or the “Nakba,” as part of the Haganah forces, which participated in the expulsion of the Palestinians. As a director, Rothschild does not judge or confront his grandmother but attempts to understand her Zionism as someone who was forced to flee to a new society and pressured to “belong.”

Throughout Ruth’s testimony, or the part that we see, the only mention of the Palestinians is that of their beautiful houses and furniture left behind. Rothschild asserts, “Palestinians are systematically absent from Zionist narratives.” The silence of the grandmother is not malicious but structural, as her generation was not raised to incorporate the narrative of Palestinians. Rothschild uses these moments to interrogate how memory is built through omission and exposes the selective nature of remembrance.

This pressure to “belong” is also felt by Rothschild, who joins the military. He mentions his grandfather, who worked with the British drawing propaganda posters against the Nazis, and later made posters promoting the Zionist narrative of a Jewish Israeli state. Seventy years later, he inherits his task as a soldier to make the military attractive. Rothschild participated in the 2009 war in Gaza, during which, he states, many Palestinians were killed. This clear historical continuity—of creating a certain image of Israel—is broken by Rothschild, who decides to turn the camera back on that legacy and expose it. One piece of footage, shot by Rothschild and featured in the film, shows a raid on a Palestinian village to arrest a “boy,” blindfolding him and taking him to the back of a van. What looks like an episode of Cops, the American law enforcement TV show, turns into a haunting metaphor for what the camera (and conscience) cannot capture.

Rothschild makes the tough choice of speaking about the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, showing his struggle to process two simultaneous traumas—Israeli and Palestinian. In one scene, he narrates that an Israeli friend tells him, “We have exactly five minutes to grieve before our pain is used as an excuse for more violence,” a rare sentiment to be expressed in a film screened in Germany and funded by a German organization. This arc captures the moral compression of the film: grief is political, weaponized, and never private. Around the world, and in Germany, Jewish voices critical of the Israeli government and its military practices were not spared accusations of being anti-Semitic or self-hating Jews. Hence, they are stripped of any agency when it comes to their grief as well as their objection to the cycle of retaliation.

The documentary switches back and forth to Berlin’s Neukölln district, particularly Hermannplatz and Sonnenallee, called by locals “the Arab street,” where many shops, restaurants, and cultural centers have celebrated Arab culture since the early 2000s. The area is also home to many pro-Palestine protests. It’s a place where Rothschild enjoys taking his child to eat hummus but where he is also fearful to speak Hebrew. The slow-burn cinematography brilliantly captures his fears, honesty, dilemmas, and hopes for another reality where he can freely reveal to the Arab chef that he is Israeli.

Rothschild belongs to a generation of filmmakers who attempt to understand their positionality in the current sphere of trauma, memory, violence, exile and genocide, through understanding their families. Days after October 7th 2023, DOK Leipzig screened Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias; then in 2024 it screened Yvann Yagchi’s documentary There Was Nothing Here Before. Rothschild does not promise nor offer a closure; finished before the current ceasefire, the film does not resolve guilt but features an ongoing process where millions are living with unresolvable histories, including him.

Director: Ron Rothschild
Script: Gil Rothschild
Cinematographer: Ron Rothschild, Julien Mayer, Masha Biller, Fion Mutert, Sina Aghazadeh
Editor: Astrid Hohle Hansen
Producer: Yusuf Celik
Sound Design: Vadim Mühlberg
Score:Georg Mausolf
Venue: at DOK Leipzig (German Competition).
In English, German, Hebrew
79 min

The film is essentially a conversation between Coppens and her grandfather, who describes himself as a “willing participant” from the jump, and happy to be along for the ride without knowing exactly what his granddaughter intends to talk about. He’s confident it will be worthwhile, and makes a point of reminding her he wants to see the finished product, eagerly awaiting the cinematic result of their chats. He’s primarily interested in his words being immortalized on camera because, at his age, he’s afraid his memory might become less reliable as time goes on.

Of course, given the director herself was born in 1980 and hails from Germany, it’s logical to assume at least one topic will be broached, concerning her grandfather’s generation, and he does indeed go into detail about what it was like to live in the Nazi era as someone who was not ideologically aligned with the predominant political party. Then there’s the subsequent time period of the German Democratic Republic, and the hardships of dealing with entities such as the Stasi in East Germany. And, after 1990, the post-reunification epoch, which leads to the film’s main question: how did those decades shape who the Germans are today, as a people?

The story of a single family becomes a portrait of an entire nation over the course of the 20th century. And while that logline may be superficially similar to Edgar Reitz’s epic Heimat project (a self-titled “chronicle of Germany” spanning multiple generations from 1918 to 2000 and filmed in chunks over the course of three decades), Coppens manages to go deeper into the socio-political intricacies, whilst simultaneously delivering a relatively contained piece of work that gets all its points across in less than an hour and a half.

Key to this achievement is her relationship with the interlocutor. Their natural, familial rapport gives a certain flow to the conversation. Through her eyes, we get to watch her grandfather as though he were directly addressing us, providing us with a direct line to the invaluable treasure trove that is his recollection of a famously eventful century for Germany (and, by extension, the rest of the world). He speaks simply yet eloquently, with the resulting film feeling like a fireside chat shared with everyone, perfectly embodying his initial statement about being happy to partake in his granddaughter’s cinematic endeavor.

At once personal and profoundly universal, Sediments is a formidable monument to the power of memory, chronicling a slice of history so that neither the family nor the audience will forget what happened. And at a time when those ideologies of yesteryear keep staging comebacks as though they were past-their-prime rock stars, testimony like the one captured by Coppens becomes even more precious.

Director, Screenwriter, Producer: Laura Coppens
Cinematography: Pierre Reischer, Laura Coppens
Music: Azadeh Zandieh
Sound: Azadeh Zandieh
Production company: Srikandi Films
World sales: Srikandi Films
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Panorama: Middle and Eastern Europe)
In German
81 minutes

Shot on two continents, the film is rooted in Switzerland’s relationship with the country then known as Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Per the opening textual introduction, this is where two explorers, the cousins Paul and Fritz Sarasin, traveled between 1883 and 1913, bringing numerous artefacts with them back to Basel as part of their natural history research. In the present day, Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachige, who is conducting her own research in various Swiss museums, comes across the very large collection amassed by the cousins.

Further inquiries indicate the methods used at the time were sometimes quite brutal, and Deneth’s discovery leads to a lengthy process whereby she and the chief of the Wanniyala-Aetto, the indigenous Sri Lankan community that created the artefacts, seek the return of all the items stored in Basel. The museum is refreshingly willing to cooperate, subverting the usual image one may have of European institutions that refuse to even so much as acknowledge the sometimes controversial history of their collections (the British Museum is famous for blocking people on social media if they post memes on the subject), and a dialogue begins between the two parties, shedding new light on what went down almost a century and a half ago.

Ably assisted by the prolific cinematographer Jonas Jäggy, whose works spans a wide range of documentaries (most recently Architektur des Glücks, about the history of the troubled casino in the Italian enclave of Campione, on the shores of Lake Lugano), Brändli puts his fascinatingly multifaceted background to good use, crafting a deceptively straightforward film that is at once about history, ethnology, cultural ethics and how to deal with the latter in a post-colonial era.

And while the director is clearly on the side of the artists and indigenous people striving to recover a vital piece of their history, there’s no attempt to demonize the Swiss institutions involved, thematically or visually: whereas other filmmakers might have contrasted the drab bureaucratic grayness of the museum’s office space with the more vibrant color palette of the Sri Lankan landscape, Brändli frames both countries and interested parties as equally dignified conversation partners engaging in a sincere exchange about the way the world was viewed centuries ago and how that perspective has changed, and is changing still, in the new millennium.

Over the course of (just under) two hours, Elephants & Squirrels is informative, illuminating, engrossing, and entertaining. It’s a richly detailed journey through time and space that takes a very familiar topic and explores it through a very geographically precise prism, telling a universal story that draws us in via its cultural specificity, getting to the heart and art of the matter with clever, thorough elegance.

Director, Screenwriter: Gregor Brändli
Producer: Frank Matter
Cinematography: Jonas Jäggy
Music: Yanik Soland
Sound: Thomas Rechberger
Production companies: soap factory GmbH, SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen
World sales: Filmotor S.R.O.
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Documentary Competition)
In English, Sinhalese, Swiss German, Vedda
114 minutes

Produced by the Danish broadcaster DR, Take the Money and Run is enjoying its German premiere at DOK Leipzig this week following an acclaimed festival run at CPH: DOX, Tribeca and others. Its zippy blend of close-up reportage with brief animated segments feel like a good match for the long-running East German event, where documentary and animation are the two main areas of focus. More festivals are likely to book this highly entertaining yarn, which also has solid credentials for big or small screen sales with its marketable mix of charismatic anti-hero, twist-heavy story and slick production values.

In 2021, the Kunsten modern art gallery in the northern Danish city of Aalborg commissioned Jens Haaning to recreate two of his earlier works for an exhibition, conceptual pieces which placed real money inside picture frames, bluntly literal illustrations of average wages in Denmark and Austria respectively. The museum lent the artist 532,000 Danish krone (roughly equivalent to 74,000 Euros, or 85,000 US dollars) for the purpose, but instead of completing the agreed works he pocketed the cash and delivered two blank frames under the title Take the Money and Run. It was part stealth heist, and part audacious performance art statement.

The museum displayed the works anyway, but when Haaning refused to return the money, they launched a civil lawsuit against him which became an international news story. Juncker’s cameras follow this colourful public battle, with the artist making audacious claims in interviews, insisting he cannot repay the money because breaching his contract was the whole point of the artwork. He then launches a counter-suit against the gallery bosses, claiming they actually owe him millions for selling images of his work to global media outlets. News pundits seize on the story, with some applauding Haaning as a Banksy-style provocateur exposing the greed and stupidity of the art world, while others attack him as a common thief.

Pseudo-shocking films which excoriate the contemporary art scene as a pretentious, money-driven sham feel pretty tired nowadays, but Juncker correctly surmises there is more to this case than mere commerce. Digging into Haaning’s back story, he finds bipolar depression stretching back to childhood, a key driver of his extreme mood swings and impulsive, self-destructive behaviour. “My whole life has been one long bad decision,” he jokes in a lucid moment between crushing slumps and manic episodes.

That said, the default tone of Take the Money and Run is comic, largely because Haaning is such an amusingly articulate, mischievous, loose-cannon protagonist. Despite mounting debts and legal battles, he continues to spend money he does not have on madcap schemes. Fleeing Copenhagen for the tranquil Danish island of Møn, he attempts to buy a disused village post office for his new studio headquarters, desperately begging his bank for a bridging loan, then jetting off to Europe in a crazed bid to raise some fast cash. “I have headache,” his hilariously deadpan Romanian curator scowls after their fruitless discussion. “This is not happy meeting.”

Take the Money and Run feels oddly anticlimactic in its final act. Juncker covers the court case with minimal drama, condensing it into a few terse phone calls and quickfire media reactions. The verdict sends Haaning into a deep depression compounded by looming financial disaster. But without getting into too many spoilers, a compromise deal allows him, and the film, a happy ending of sorts.

This mental heath subplot deserves deeper exploration, just as Haaning’s ever-changing “explanations” of his artistic intentions would have benefited from more investigative rigour. But Juncker seems a little too eager to squeeze a messy, contradictory, psychologically complex story into a neat narrative. To this end, his use of heart-tugging piano music becomes jarringly heavy-handed at times. That said, his deft command of rapid-fire visual collage, percussive jump cuts and brief animated sections undeniably make for a punchy stylistic package overall, a persuasive aesthetic mirror of his subject’s scrambled mental state.

Director, cinematography: Ole Juncker
Editing: Lars Juul
Producers: Bjarte Mørner Tveit, Mette Heide
Music: Francois Rousselot
Animation: Rasmus Brink
Venue: Dok Leipzig Festival (Audience Competition)
Production company, world sales: DR (Denmark)
In Danish, English
82 minutes

A fellow Ugandan, poet and playwright turned film-maker Patience Nitumwesiga paints a rich, detailed portrait of Nyanzi with this impressive debut feature. The Woman Who Poked the Leopard is a slightly untidy sprawl in places, but its protagonist is such an explosively charismatic subject that a few loose ends scarcely matter. Fresh from its world premiere in competition at Dok Leipzig, this colourful documentary should find a keen audience at further festivals and beyond, with a berth already booked at IDFA next month.

The Woman Who Poked the Leopard opens in the German city of Munich, where Nyanzi and her three teenage children have lived for their own safety since 2022 on a writers-in-exile scholarship from anti-censorship campaign group PEN. Cutting away from these more contemporary scenes, Nitumwesiga fills in her back story in a series of non-linear flashbacks, including two lively sequences that show her protesting her legally dubious firing from Uganda’s Makerere University in 2016, then returning to host a rabble-rousing meeting there four years later. Each of these clashes culminates in Nyanzi stripping semi-naked, singing loudly and shouting down police officers who try to remove her as “rapists” and “terrorists”.

But the most jaw-dropping set-piece here features footage from Nyanzi’s court case in 2018, where she takes the dock to denounce Museveni as a “dirty delinquent dictator”, calls the judge an idiot, drops a barrage of F-bombs and flashes her breasts. When she is sentenced to jail time, a riot breaks out among her screaming supporters. Mitumwesiga should probably have opened her film with these amazing scenes, though in fairness Nyanzi has a flair for turning even the most banal event into an attention-grabbing spectacle. Her account of her time in prison, including the brutal miscarriage of a baby she named Freedom, brings an abrupt shift from dark comedy to tragedy.

The film’s main narrative thread takes place in 2020, when Nyanzi runs for political office in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nitumwesiga tracks her progress in nail-biting detail, from fractious media debates and campaign meetings in the city’s slums to her ultimate, questionable defeat at the ballot box. The wider 2021 general election, which returned Museveni to power for a fifth presidential term, was widely condemned for vote-rigging, ballot-stuffing, harassment of opposition candidates and violent protests which left more than 50 people dead. Having rewritten Uganda’s election rules to allow him to run again, Museveni is seeking a sixth term next year, marking four decades in power.

The Woman Who Poked the Leopard is clearly a love letter to Nyanzi, but it is not wholly uncritical. Nitumwesiga applies a more personal, emotional focus in the film’s final act, delicately probing how her heroine’s notoriety as a public figure has impacted on her children and domestic life. Her strikingly beautiful daughter Baraka, prematurely wise and world-weary at 16, plays an impressive role here as unofficial family therapist, taking on surrogate maternal responsibilty for her younger twin brothers Kato and Wasswa. When Baraka confronts her mother over her self-absorbed aloofness, she becomes awkward and defensive. That said, Nyanzi is primarily motivated by her children’s welfare when she reluctantly agrees to go into European exile, alarmed by the Ugandan regime’s savage torture and imprisonment of another satirical writer, Kakwenza Rukirabashaija.

Nitumwesiga and her team use a mostly hand-held shooting style, often using long takes to tease out emotional subtext. Deployed sparingly but effectively, a background soundtrack spans East African folk music, a burst of Mozart and a grimly ironic use of Uganda’s uplifting nation anthem, which plays over a montage of police brutality against unarmed protesters. Angry and harrowing one minute, hilarious and inspiring the next, The Woman Who Poked the Leopard pays worthy tribute to a complex but immensely admirable figure bravely standing up to patriarchal thugs who hide behind dubious notions of respectability and tradition. Which makes this not just an African story but increasingly, depressingly universal.

Director: Patience Nitumwesiga
Cinematography: Racheal Mambo, Phil Wilmot
Editing: Kristen van Schie
Music: Sylvia Babirye
Production companies, world sales: Shagika (Uganda), Parabellum (Germany)
Producers: Rosie Motene, Phil Wilmot, Patience Nitumwesiga
Venue: Dok Leipzig Festival (German Competition Documentary Film)
In English, Luganda
107 minutes

Born in Ticino and based in Geneva, Swiss animator Marcel Barelli is known for his short films dealing with strange creatures, family and the traditions of the Italian-speaking community he grew up in. Some of those themes come to the fore again in his feature debut Mary Anning, which has enjoyed plenty of popularity on the festival circuit since its world premiere in Annecy. Whether that will translate to theatrical success outside of the director’s home country and the French-language realm remains to be seen, primarily since the visually appealing 2D animation is seen as a commercial drawback by some distributors in the current cinematic landscape.

Cinephiles may recognize the title, and the character it refers to, from Francis Lee’s 2020 drama Ammonite, where Mary was played by Kate Winslet and enjoyed an illicit (and fictional) love affair with another woman, played by Saoirse Ronan (a detail that proved divisive even among Anning’s distant relatives). Barelli’s film, as per the French version’s subtitle Fossil Hunter, deals with the better known aspect of Mary’s life, that is to say her career as a paleontologist. Specifically, it is rooted in the documented fact that her passion for fossils began at an early age, when she was 12 and helped her father look for them to supplement the family’s income.

Things change when he disappears, leaving behind only a mysterious drawing. Young Mary becomes determined to figure out its meaning, a spiritual quest that will forge friendships and set the course for her future. That quest is the jumping-off point for Barelli’s work, which showcases a visual identity closer to the output of the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon (or fellow Nadasdy Film director Isabelle Favez, with whom lead animator Maëlle Chevallier has collaborated previously), but with the filmmaker’s quirky humor well integrated into proceedings, albeit via a more child-friendly tone compared to his rather caustic shorts.

The director’s trademark insanity may have taken a bit of a backseat, perhaps for the sake of a wider appeal that is required for a feature length project with international ambitions (the film is a co-production between Switzerland and Belgium), but the visual inventiveness remains unscathed, immaculate, enthralling. Each frame is painstakingly crafted by hand, highlighting the undying appeal of 2D animation in an increasingly computer-dominated field (not coincidentally, Barelli is an outspoken critic of more recent advancements in technology, namely the use of AI in animated works), and the deceptive simplicity of the world reflects the wider universe the 12-year old Mary doesn’t yet know she will become an integral part of.

There may be less for adult fans of Barelli’s work to chew on this time around, but as a mainstream calling card that could lead to possible oddball projects in feature length format, Mary Anning remains a charming, distinctively European piece of hand-drawn adventurousness for all ages.

Director: Marcel Barelli
Screenwriters: Marcel Barelli, Magali Pouzol, Pierre-Luc Granjon
Cast: Camille D’Hainaut, Jason Vansilliette, Alexia Depicker, Bastien Van Dyck, Johanne Pastor, Laurent Bonnet, Jean-Pierre Baudson, Claude Musungayi, Bérénice Loveniers, Bénédicte Philippon, Aurélien Ringelheim
Producers: Nicolas Burlet, Arnaud Demuynck, Tatjana Kozar
Cinematography : Marjolaine Perreten
Production design: Marjolaine Perreten
Music: Shyle Zalewski
Sound: Jérôme Vittoz
Production companies: Nadasdy Film, RSI Radiotelevisione svizzera, La Boîte, … Productions, Versus Production, RTBF
World sales: Be For Films
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Young Eyes)
In French
70 minutes

Endless Cookie took nine years to complete, a process that becomes part of the family’s on-screen story, in a film that concludes that looking to the past is essential as a means to navigate and ease the future. It opens with Seth receiving a large cheque, his film proposal grant’s acceptance enabling him to fly from Toronto to visit his indigenous half-brother Pete in Shamatawwa, a remote First Nations community in northern Manitoba, to record seven stories about his life for the project’s audio. Seth’s inability to deliver the film on time amid deadline extensions from skeptical backers becomes a running gag. During a phone call to arrange the first of several Manitoba visits, Seth’s cat scratches up his sofa, while Pete’s dog eats his sock, as news is shared of the blaze that destroyed the tepee he wanted to sleep in, in a catastrophic melee of distractions that is typical of their family life and never abates. But finally and miraculously, he achieves his stated goal of making something “funny, beautiful, spiritual, complex, simple and true,” a disarming, tremendously wide-ranging sweep, and no mean feat.

Rather than seven clearly structured stories, what results is a hodge-podge of wild incident and digression, spanning a cast of colourful characters: extended family and acquaintances, an array of pet dogs and puppies, and the cowardly law enforcement figures which become an unavoidable part of institutionalised strongarm control over indigenous lives and resources, who are mentioned with the wry, understated resignation Pete brings to all his tales. Actual family photos are included, that anchor the drawn narratives in evidential reality, and tend to confirm some of the more outrageous yarns. From a hand stuck in an animal trap to a hard liquor phase in which Pete returned to an old apartment and dragged its current tenant out of bed, the memories recall both traditional Cree hunting life, and the disorientation of disenfranchised urbanisation. Ancestral knowledge, as a new generation rebuilds the tepee, and a caribou is cut up and its hide prepared, abounds, along with the transmission of new modes of processing identity (within the film, young Cookie Scriver is making her own unsettling animation, about sleep paralysis.) Enforced separation for a stolen generation of kids, suicide and substance abuse are among family experiences in a litany of trauma, as First Nations people were left restricted to tiny reserves, their hunting lands exploited in a rush for minerals, and the damming of rivers upending their fishing. Snippets of radio reports sound through the household hubbub, telling of the lack of clean drinking water on reserves throughout Canada, and indigenous over-representation in Canadian jails due to racism in policing and a corrupt justice system.

Endless Cookie crams a huge amount of suffering and oppression into its tapestry of family history — and its magic is that it conveys this macrocosmic tragedy of the colonial dispossession of a people with such a light touch of lunacy and joy in everyday strangeness this is no heavy chore for the audience. What’s more, its outlook is one of hope, through its very existence and the endless generation and circulation of memories, and the resurgence it promises of what for a time may have seemed lost, like the visions in cigarette smoke that the grandmother would look for, just as medicine men in shaking tents had seen where animals could be hunted, relaying the information to other tents, in the manner of the modern internet.

Directors, Screenwriters: Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver
Producers: Daniel Bekerman, Chris Yurkovich, Alex Ordanis, Jason Ryle, Seth Scriver
Editor: Sydney Cowper
Sound: Andrew Zuckerman
Production company: Scythia Films (Canada)
Sales: Magnify
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Animated Film)
In English
97 minutes

The central protagonist of Active Vocabulary is Maria Kalinitscheva, an idealistic young teacher who began her career in a village called Arbagar in the remote Transbaikal province around 4000 miles east of Moscow. Shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, Kalinitscheva made casual remarks against the war to four of her students. One made a clandestine recording of their conversation, sharing it with her parents and the school authorities. Soon she was bombarded with hostile messages warning her to keep her “fascist” opinions to herself. A heavy-handed investigation by FSB security service followed.

In the summer of 2022, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in full swing, and compulsory pro-war propaganda lessons on the school curriculum, Kalinitscheva fled to Germany and applied for political asylum. In Berlin, where she is now living and teaching again, she re-stages her traumatic Russian experiences as an English-language classroom drama, intended as a kind of living civics lesson. German schoolchildren play both victim and villain roles while debating the ethics of censorship, persecution and free expression.

A fellow Russian emigre now living in Germany, Lokshina navigates these events in an elliptical, lateral-thinking, occasionally ponderous manner. She intercuts Kalinitscheva’s story with footage shot outside Moscow just days before Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine, of ballsy female protestors confronting construction workers as they try to build on a protected forest region, beginning with a new school. The connections between these threads seem tangential, though both are about illegal seizure of land, and schools as weapons in wider social battles.

In hypnotically sombre voice-over, Lokshina also includes her own fragmentary memories of the Russian education system, plus wider ruminations on how schools have always been laboratories for state indoctrination, particularity in authoritarian nations that need to prepare young minds for future wars. Brief musings about Germany’s own school safeguarding rules, designed to shield students from extremist teachers in the aftermath of the Nazi era, and the problematic track record of Czech artist Walter Womacka, whose striking Socialist Realist murals adorn the former Education Department building in East Berlin, are intriguing subplots that would have benefited from more screen time and more narrative context.

In visual terms, Active Vocabulary offers an inventive stylistic tapestry that includes straight observational documentary, computer graphics, found footage and snippets of vintage animation. Another recurring motif are square mid-screen designs that initially look like abstract expressionist paintings, but which turn out to be satellite images from the European Space Agency of Moscow, Berlin and the Ukrainian border regions that Russia is currently fighting to annexe. There are plenty of great ideas here, even if Lokshina leaves too many of them disconnected and under-explained, serving up a fascinating jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing.

Director, screenwriter, producer: Yulia Lokshina
Cinematographer: Nina Wesemann
Editors:Yulia Lokshina, Maya Klar
Sound: Jakob Gross
Sound Design: Alejandro Weyler
Animation: Felix Klee
Production company, world sales: Objetos Perdidos (Germany)
Venue: Dok Leipzig Festival (German Competition Documentary Film)
In German, English, Russian, Kyrgyz
82 minutes

The first ever woman councillor to be elected in her socially conservative rural corner of northern Iran, a region dominated by Turkish Azeri speakers and deeply ingrained patriarchal values, the fortysomething Shahverdi is a lifelong rebel against gender norms. A proudly single divorcee, she rides a motorcycle, shuns overly feminine clothes, and fights against sexist tradition on a daily basis. The slow-burn pace and worthy subject matter of Cutting Through Rocks may sound dauntingly dry but Khaki and Eyni find warmth, humour and universal resonance in this very local story, which has its German premiere in Dok Leipzig this week after winning prizes at Sundance, Visions du Reel, Hot Docs and other festivals.

Khaki and Eyni both have Iranian heritage, the latter growing up in the region depicted in Cutting Through Rocks. To prepare for the project, they visited Shahverdi over several years, getting to know her family and her community intimately. Given the sensitive subject matter in an already heavily censorious film climate, they inevitably faced challenges from the authorities. Their offices were raided, their hard drives seized, and filming shut down for months. At one point they were banned from leaving Iran for a whole year. And yet, much like their doggedly determined heroine, they persisted.

Even before she is elected, we see Shahverdi staging a family mutiny among her six sisters, tearing up a dubious contact they were pressured into signing by their husbands in a shameless bid to steal their shared inheritance. When she runs for office, she tells voters, her main motive is so “our girls will have a better future”. The women and younger men of the village get behind her, but the older men routinely denigrate her efforts, claiming nobody will accept a woman in charge. Even so, she wins a place on the council, and begins to push for real change in a sclerotic system.

After her election victory, Shahverdi visits an all-girls school and makes the teenage students pledge to finish their studies and pursue independent careers before marrying. In an ingenious move, she arranges to have domestic gas delivered to the village, but makes it contingent on men sharing their property with their wives, smuggling social progress through by stealth and guile. “Now I’m afraid that my wife will build a wall in the middle of my house,” one man jokes after grudgingly signing over half his home.

In the film’s most touching subplot, Shahverdi intervenes to become guardian to a teenage schoolgirl, Fereshteh, who was forced to marry at 12 by her family, and is now navigating a painful divorce and potentially another arranged marriage. After inviting Fereshteh into her home, Shahverdi guides her through the grim divorce process, including a judge pressuring the girl to resign herself to her “destiny” by staying with a man twice her age. The older woman also takes another schoolgirl under her wing, the smart and spirited Zahra, teaching her to ride a motorcycle. These quasi-maternal mentor relationships are full of tenderness, though they inevitably create tension with the male gatekeepers of patriarchal power, who do their best to sabotage Shahverdi’s growing reputation as a subversive role model for young women.

Khaki and Eyni mostly shoot Cutting Through Rocks in a classically sober cine-verite style, sporadically punctuated with grand ariel landscape shots and recurring carpet-weaving motifs that bring a welcome splash of visual poetry. A solemn score is used very sparingly, mostly when the narrative takes a darker turn. This austere aesthetic shows impressive poise and tonal control, but can feel flat and conventional. More social, cultural and regional context might also have helped illuminate this story’s deeper political undercurrents.

No spoilers here but Shahverdi’s world-changing ambitions are eventually sidetracked by bitter betrayals, whispering campaigns and trumped-up legal charges, which only serve to underscore how traditional gender roles are socially constructed fictions, especially in deeply sexist societies. And yet the film-makers are careful not to deliver a simplistic, sensational crash-and-burn story. Despite its sombre final act, Cutting Through Rocks ends on a cautiously optimistic note, quietly celebrating heroic stoics like Shahverdi can make small but steady gains in the never-ending battle for equality.

Directors, producers,editors: Sara Khaki, Mohammadreza Eyni
Cinematography: Mohammadreza Eyni
Music, sound: Karim Sebastian Elias
Production companies: Gandom Films (Iran), Inselfilm (Germany)
World sales: Autolook
Venue: Dok Leipzig (Audience Award)
In Farsi, Azeri
95 minutes

The latest Dok Leipzig opened with a screening of Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students, French director Claire Simon’s enjoyably off-beat investigative film about young readers reacting to the work of the 2022 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Like much of the festival program, Simon’s documentary makes an impassioned case for culture as a politically, intellectually, emotionally engaged activity. A message which feels especially urgent in these polarised, post-truth times.

“Culture is at risk,” warned the festival’s outgoing director Christoph Terhechte in his opening speech. “It is threatened by dwindling resources, by political influence, by self-censorship, and last but not least, by indifference. So we decided to open our 68th festival with a film about the potential and the value of culture.” In charge since 2019, Terhechte is stepping down after this edition for personal reasons, to be replaced by Aleksandra “Ola” Stazsel. Later this week, both will share a stage for a free public talk about the festival’s future, a timely theme in the light of deepening government cuts which saw Dok Leipzig’s budget shrink this year.

Inaugurated in 1955, the world’s longest-running documentary festival has had a few reboots and makeovers since its shaky birth under East Germany’s censorious Communist regime. But in recent years it has become a world-class platform for adventurous non-fiction films, often incorporating elements of visual art and bold formal experimentation. Among the buzzy world premieres due later this week in the International Documentary Competition section are Green Desert by Chilean artist-filmmaker Meliza Luna Venegas, which blends performance art with bleakly beautiful tableaux from Chile’s ravaged forest landscape, and Yulia Lokshina’s Active Vocabulary, about an exiled Russian schoolteacher who enlists her own students to re-enact her dramatic escape to Germany after being denounced for criticising the war in Ukraine.

Dok Leipzig always has its playfully entertaining side, especially in the animation section, which Terhechte has broadened and elevated significantly during his tenure. But critical thinking and hard-hitting social issues are the festival’s heartbeat. Also making its debut in competition is Srdan Kovacevic’s The Thing to be Done, a David-vs-Goliath portrait of a small Slovenian campaign group fighting for the rights of exploited workers across Europe. Another prestige world premiere is the complete long-form version of Conbody vs Everybody, the new TV documehtary series by Hollywood director Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone), which follows the a former drug dealer and ex-con as he struggles to launch a gym business in his old Lower East Side neighbourhood.

This blend of uncompromising aesthetics with social engagement also underpins Dok Leipzig’s wider spread of sections. This year, the festival salutes U.S. artist-director Lee Ann Schmidt, whose left-field 16mm essay-films chronicle the dark side and hollow myths of the American Dream. In its Industry events program, Leipzig is also hosting an invite-only session called Think Tank in partnership with Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, which is designed to find practical ways to support displaced, exiled or marginalised filmmakers whose livelihoods are at risk. Among the case studies covered will be directors from Palestine, Georgia, Hungary and Myanmar. A serious festival for serious times, Dok Leipzig runs from October 27 to November 2.

Vast landscapes that might otherwise be silent are the site of toil by humans using machinery and tools to mould and move nature’s snowfalls into manageable formations. The toothy jaws of bulldozers scoop up chunks of powder and metallic shovels shush thick drifts from doorways, as inhabitants wage a cyclical battle to keep nature at bay and mould its contours to their own ends, making it habitable, and even enjoyable as a playground for leisure pursuits. It’s work that has become unpredictable, symptomatic of a human-fuelled climate crisis that is irrevocably changing these places, and wreaking havoc through fluctuating snowfall.

Geyrhalter has, in a career of more than three decades, often focused a broad gaze on the uses and abuses of the earth by humans aggressively shaping their environments and leaving destructive and irrevocable traces, as in his 2016 Homo Sapiens, a haunting collection of abandoned constructions being reclaimed by nature, and 2019’s Earth, which showed the physical transformation of sections of the planet by mining extraction. Easy on the eye and urgent in its environmental implications, Melt should attract similarly wide festival interest.

Melt’s concept is straightforward, even simple, as in a cumulative, matter-of-fact way it shows humans going about their duties in freezing workplaces. They take time out to talk straight to camera about how the snow situation has altered year by year, in a manner devoid of politics or moralising, but all the more effective in its unvarnished description of the daily lived reality of a climate crisis impossible to deny. A rice-growing couple in a village in Japan’s Niigata prefecture who spend cosy evenings with their cat insulated from the cold by a crackling fire reflect on subsistence in a harsh but beloved environment, which is being lost to hotter months and dwindling snow. Such places are breathtaking to behold, but have a treacherous force one must respect to survive, locals point out. Geyrhalter challenges audiences to not just consume the landscape through his magnificent, static long shots, but to understand its fragility, and the terrible power of a natural world thrown out of balance by human hubris.

In resorts in France and Austria skiing can no longer be taken for granted. Artificial snow is manufactured and pumped out, its fabricated blobs a poor imitation of the always-unique star shapes of nature’s slowly formed crystals, and its creation a desperate measure to top up a new scarcity, so that the sporting runs can continue, in commercial fantasylands of winter fun where flouro-suited women with long ponytails lead outdoor dance routines to pounding techno at the bottom of slopes. Even then, some fields have been closed as unsustainable, their chair lifts removed, a full stop to a seasonal rotation of skiers. Visitors to Katnajokull Glacier in Iceland are led into a cave by a guide who explains that it will soon no longer exist, due to the mass of ice’s fast retreat. An impressive, textured soundtrack combines with crisp imagery for an unadorned but palpable sense of place that feels alive and lived-in rather than simply decorative.

The touristic commercialism of these destinations is thrown into sharp relief by a culminating segment at Neumayer Station III in the Antarctic, where residents at a German research outpost reflect on the way that the solidarity of their work wards off loneliness, and the quiet solitude for reflection in such an isolated space creates new realisations about humankind’s chaotic and destructive activities. Here, the dramatic changes underway by record-breaking melting events, which are set to have a catastrophic impact on more populated parts of the globe already absorbing slighter shifts, feel far from abstract to the team in their routine of scientific testing, and place the already ambitiously broad-sweeping survey into a deeper, critical perspective.

Director, Cinematographer: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Producers: Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Michael Kitzberger, Wolfgang Widerhofer, Markus Glaser
Editor: Gernot Grassl
Sound: Sophia Laggner, Hjalti Bager-Jonathansson, Eva Hausberger, Sergey Martynyuk, Ariane Pellini
Sound Design: Florian Kindlinger, Flora Rajakowitsch
Production company: Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion (Austria)
Sales: Outlook Filmsales
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Documentary Feature Competition)
In Japanese, German, English, French
125 minutes

The premise of this documentary is simple, and on the surface may seem overly specific, but it is anything but when infused with the sensitive and contagious curiosity of Simon. In a career spanning more than four decades, she has, in the manner of American director Frederick Wiseman, often been drawn to the richness of interactions within institutions as microcosms of wider society, and in documentaries such as The Graduation (2016) and Elementary (2024) tapped into the humanity that plays out within the social space of the education system, revealing dynamics of race, class, and gender that shape students, the vividness and sheer force of life of unique personalities, and both the power and limits of self-determination.

Ernaux, who reached Nobel stature from working class beginnings in Normandy and is known for unvarnished accounts of personal history and collective memory that are not inhibited by shame and sometimes shocking in their candid details, proves to be a remarkable prompt for students to consider their own origins, and the degree to which they feel pressured by social norms that dictate that parts of themselves are unpalatable and necessary to repress. Ernaux’s unromantic approach of “flat writing,” descriptions more factual than overloaded with meaning, allows them space to make their own judgments, as they consider the texts in the light of their own pasts. Simon visits a number of schools across Paris, the provinces and Cayenne, ensuring a diversity of voices, and that the colonial agenda in France’s educational system is not effaced. Modes of expression in creole languages also become part of the discussion of belonging, communication and self-censorship.

Pupils read at times sexually frank passages aloud from various assigned Ernaux books, in which she describes a clandestine abortion she had in France in the 1960s, her obsessive affair with a younger man, and the increasing gulf of understanding between herself and her parents as her academic horizons expanded and her way of seeing the world diverged. The brutal, clinical honesty with which Ernaux shares her taboo thoughts and feelings provokes a range of class reactions and discussions around sexual consent, self-worth, freedom and dignity. Challenging the comfort zone of the teenagers and led by teachers from a feminist angle, these exchanges connect with a thematic thread of women’s ownership of their own bodies and experiences that runs through Simon’s own cinema, including her recent, much-discussed Our Body (2023), shot within a gynecological clinic in Paris, as women’s bodies come up against the medical system.

In Writing Life, Simon takes her camera and intimate, close-in way of filming out of the classrooms to bus stops and other gathering spots where the students continue their personal and communal engagement with Ernaux’s work, ensuring the film never feels hemmed in or stuffily scholastic. Rather, what emerges is a vibrant and alive reminder, in a world increasingly unseduced by the printed page, of how seamlessly the artistic expression of honest and renegade thinkers complements life, and is able to nourish young minds in an active and constantly transformative manner as they find their own way in society and in a France with a powerful, ages-old establishment all too eager to mould a population into a certain prescribed image.

Director, Screenwriter, Cinematographer: Claire Simon
Producer: Emmanuel Perreau
Editor: Luc Forveille
Sound: Jules Jasko, Nathalie Vidal, Clément Claude, Pierre Bompy
Production company: Rosebud Productions (France)
Sales: Be For Films
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Opening Film)
In French
90 minutes