DOK Leipzig, the more widely used abbreviation of International Leipzig Film Week for Documentary and Animation Film, is always a politically and intellectually engaging event, especially in times of heightened conflict, as non-fiction films carry an extra obligation to put world events under critical scrutiny. This year’s program had timely films about ongoing conflicts in Israel and Gaza, Ukraine and Georgia. But even the most puritanical documentary nerd needs more than one colour in the rainbow, and thankfully the festival was also rich in personal stories, experimental artworks, quirky animations and playful passion projects.

One of the festival’s highest prizes, The Golden Dove for Best International Documentary, went to French director Dominique Cabrera for her unorthodox memoir film La Jetée, the Fifth Shot. Tracing Cabrera’s unlikely family connections to Chris Marker’s celebrated experimental sci-fi short La Jetée (1962), this was a perfect DOK Leipzig winner: a documentary about a documentary, but also about unreliable memory, post-colonial politics and the elusive search for cinematic truth. The Golden Dove for Best German Documentary, meanwhile, was awarded to Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble for Tarantism Revisited, a fascinating deep-dive study of tarantism, a blend of ecstatic dancing and religious ritual rooted in the folklore of southern Italy. Both films are Leipzig world premieres, and should go on to wider festival play.

Picking up the Golden Dove for Best Animated Feature was Hungarian director László Csáki’s Pelikan Blue, a genial blend of lo-fi 2D graphics and non-fiction audio interviews recalling a boom time in the early 1990s, when Soviet Communism had just collapsed and foreign rail travel suddenly opened up for citizens of the former Eastern Bloc nations. But train journeys were not cheap, so an enterprising gang of young Hungarians figured out a cheeky scheme to forge the hand-written tickets of the time, initially enjoying limitless travel across Europe, then running a lucrative illegal business. This slight but entertaining throwback to more innocent times has also been shortlisted for the European Film Awards on December 7.

Across the wider Leipzig program this year were multiple films that addressed Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. They came from different eras and voices, all attempting to convey what it means to be Palestinian after 1948, whether living in the diaspora, being Palestinian with an Israeli passport, residing in a refugee camp in Syria, stranded in a West Bank village, or raised in a PLO orphanage in Beirut. Some of these film-makers were Palestinians, as in the case of Marwan Salamah’s Aida (1985), Husein Bastouni’s Where the Jasmine Always Blooms (2024), and Yvann Yagchi’s There Was Nothing Here Before (2024). But there were also films by Israelis, as in Edna Politi’s For the Palestinians (1973), and Americans, such as Tal Barda’s I Shall Not Hate (2024). There was even a relic from the dusty archives of the GDR, Solidarity in Action (1970), echoing the same long-running call for Palestinian self-determination.

With their varied time periods, styles and arguments, these films represent a necessary counterbalance to the rising racist and anti-Arab rhetoric sadly gaining more ground in the German public sphere. Screening them in Leipzig, a city where the vocally anti-immigrant AfD party scored second place in the latest elections, was a strong statement by the festival in an era when pro-Palestinian voices calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon are increasingly subject to restrictions by the German government.

Pleas for a ceasefire in Gaza even crept into Being John Smith, the latest mischievously funny work from veteran British avant-garde film-maker John Smith, which won the Golden Dove for Best Short in the festival’s International Documentary category. Although notionally about the director’s extremely common name, this bittersweet mini-memoir also digresses into politics, medical issues, self confidence, and the career of Smith’s former student Jarvis Cocker, singer with the band Pulp.

Scattered across Leipzig, on the festival’s more experimental fringes, cinema and music, visual art and live performance collide. One of this year’s glorious left-field highlights was Spinning Dreams and Beats at the charmingly grungy boho theatre venue Schaubühne Lindenfels, a hybrid concert event which featured multiple films made using a phenakistiscope, one of the earliest animation devices, from its 19th century origins to today. This show was headlined by London-based audio-visual duo Sculpture, who blended ear-bashing electronic soundscapes with modern phenakistiscopic graphics, using a spinning DJ turntable to project surreal, psychedelic imagery directly onto a big screen. How many film festivals deliver mind-bending avant-garde performance art rooted in antique steampunk technology? DOK Leipzig may be a serious-minded festival, but it also knows how to party.

A little esoteric at times, Tarantism Revisited is an uncompromising essay-film. But even if the director duo’s formal approach sometimes lacks cohesion, the raw material is rich, the visuals very artfully packaged, and subject matter never less than fascinating. A feminist-leaning agenda to reclaim and reframe this erotically charged, heavily gendered, politically anarchic folk subculture will also give the film extra audience traction. After winning the Golden Dove prize for Best German Documentary at DOK Leipzig film festival, this engaging, lightly experimental work should secure further festival, scholarly and specialist interest.

First recorded in journals as far back as the 11th century, tarantism was once attributed to peasant women being bitten by deadly spiders or scorpions, and thus having to sweat the poison out through wild dancing. But the science behind this interpretation is very shaky, and in any case the practise soon became entangled with folklore, magic, superstition and Catholic church custom.

Video and audio archive material in Tarantism Revisited shows women dressing in white bridal gowns and congregating around the church at Galatina, typically around the feasts of Saints Peter and Paul in June. Rituals of remorse and sacrifice, their ecstatic dances sometimes involve rubbing themselves against saintly in a sexually suggestive manner, or hitting them, or even urinating on the church floor. Dreschke and Schäuble do not make this connection, but there are distant echoes here of Linda Blair’s spider-walking, foul-mouthed, diabolically possessed Regan in The Exorcist (1973).

In 1959, an interdisciplinary team led by Ernesto De Martino travelled to Apulia in the heel of Italy to try and demystify tarantism using scientific scrutiny. Dreschke and Schäuble draw heavily on this group’s extensive audio-visual archive, plus a wealth of subsequent journalistic material, news reports and books. Woven though the film are spoken-word extracts of 65 letters sent by Michela Margiotta, an epileptic peasant woman who became a tarantata, and anthropologist Annabella Rossi, part of De Martino’s original team, who later published the correspondence as part of her research. These impressionistic snapshots lends a modicum of narrative shape to a fairly unstructured film, though they only offer fragmentary insights rather than any definitive account.

Over the past few decades, some southern Italian communities have embraced tarantism as a purely aesthetic music-and-dance subculture. In 1998, Salento began hosting an annual festival based on this subgenre, Notte della Taranta, with composer Ludovico Einaudi later serving as artistic director. As Dreschke and Schäuble demonstrate, tarantella dances are now banned in churches, but promoted as part of the tourist industry. A group in Galatina is even campaigning for UNESCO to give this eye-catching folk art protected status as a piece of intangible cultural heritage.

Dreschke and Schäuble pepper their dreamlike mosaic film with some dry visual in-jokes: a Spiderman poster, a balloon with a demonic face, children on a fairground ride whose shaky movements resemble the tarantella. More seriously, the directors also highlight how women drawn to tarantism were often unmarried, marginalised, uneducated outsiders, sometimes seeking escape from abuse and trauma. It is a gutsy reading of historical events, which resonates with contemporary gender politics, but it only manifests in frustratingly opaque hints rather than as a persuasive body of evidence. While Tarantism Revisited is a rich, atmospheric, sporadically mesmerising piece of work, a little more focussed feminist analysis would have given this fascinating story more bite.

Directors screenwriters, producers: Anja Dreschke, Michaela Schäuble
Cinematography, editing: Anja Dreschke
Sound: Birgit Minichmayr
Music, sound design: Carlo Peters
Production companies: Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern (Switzerland), Petit à Petit (Germany)
Venue: DOK Leipzig film festival (German Competition Documentary)
In Italian, German, English
105 minutes

International Competition Documentary Film

Golden Dove Feature-Length Film
“La Jetée, the Fifth Shot”
Dominique Cabrera
(France)

Silver Dove Feature-Length Film
“Twice into Oblivion”
Pierre Michel Jean
(France, Haiti, Dominican Republic)

 Golden Dove Short Film
“Being John Smith”
John Smith
(UK)

Silver Dove Short Film

“What Goes Up”
Samar Al Summary
(Saudi Arabia, USA)

International Competition Animated Film

Golden Dove Feature-Length Film

“Pelikan Blue”
László Csáki
(Hungary)

 Special Mention:
“Memory Hotel”
Heinrich Sabl
(Germany)

Golden Dove Short Film
“On Weary Wings Go By”
Anu-Laura Tuttelberg
(Estonia, Lithuania)

German Competition Documentary Film

Golden Dove Feature-length Film
“Tarantism Revisited”
Anja Dreschke, Michaela Schäuble
(Germany, Switzerland)

Golden Dove Short Film
“The King of Spain”
Leonard Volkmer
(Germany)

Audience Competition

Golden Dove 
“Once upon a Time in a Forest“
Virpi Suutari
(Finland)

Partnership Awards:

DEFA Sponsoring Prize
“Moria Six“
Jennifer Mallmann
(Germany)

MDR Film Prize
“The Other One“
Marie-Magdalena Kochová
(Czech Republic, Slovakia)

Prize of the Interreligious Jury
 “Twice into Oblivion“
Pierre Michel Jean
(France, Haiti, Dominican Republic)

Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness
“The Family Approach”
Daniel Abma
(Germany)

Born in the embattled city if Mariupol, now under Russian occupation, Borets relocated to Kyiv for her own safety a decade ago. There she met the woman she calls the “anti-heroine” of her film, Natalia, a bohemian free spirit in her late sixties who lives in a ramshackle green oasis at in the heart of the city, a tiny haven for animals and flowers squeezed between car parks and towering apartment blocks. After studying film in Poland, and making a handful of shorts, the novice director returned to Kyiv to shoot a portrait of Natalia and her free-wheeling lifestyle, which includes two ex-husbands and a teenage granddaughter.

Flowers of Ukraine opens in the peaceful summer sunshine of 2021, when Natalia’s biggest enemies were disapproving neighbours and powerful property developers attempting to bulldoze her home. But after Russia invades in February 2022, her resistance takes on a larger metaphorical dimension. She becomes emblematic of the whole nation, a plucky underdog facing yet another bloody chapter in its eternal David-vs-Goliath battle against the bullying superpower next door. Though Natalia and her husbands appear to share ambivalent personal feelings towards Russia, the invasion brings up bitter memories of repressive Soviet rule, including periods when Ukrainians were banned from even speaking their own language. “We resisted then just as Ukraine resists now,” she says.

As the sky above Kyiv crackles with loud artillery explosions, the film takes on a shaky, jumpy, scary real-time urgency. But even at the height of Russian bombing, Natalia remains unbowed, refusing to leave her self-made Garden of Eden. “I have nowhere to run,” she shrugs, “I’m not afraid.” Fixing protective wooden shields over her windows, she jokes: “here is the last nail in Putin’s head”. In one scene, Natalia even offers to sign up for military service, but is rejected as too old. She contents herself with wandering though bombed-out cafes and apartments, rescuing houseplants from the rubble.

Flowers of Ukraine zips along with the same anarchic, mirthful, joyfully hedonistic energy as its protagonist. This sometimes means the context becomes a little fuzzy, with secondary characters wandering in and out of the story, then disappearing or even dying off-stage. Jumping between observational snapshots and impressionistic close-ups of fragrant nature, Borets gives the viewer only partial explanations, relying mainly on the sheer force of Natalia’s personality to carry any overall narrative thread. This approach is mostly successful, despite a few loose ends and frustratingly opaque details.

As an aesthetic experience, Flowers of Ukraine is sense-saturating paean to music and laughter, humour and mischief, love and friendship: everything that totalitarian despots like Putin despise. A lively score by Ukrainian folk-rock quartet DakhaBrakha is a great match for Natalia’s punky spirit, their irreverent brand of national celebration underscored by a handful of more explicitly political tracks, notably Russia is a Terrorist State by Kyiv-based electronic artist Tucha. Borets ends this immensely likeable debut with a dedication to grandmothers everywhere. It is a testament to her compact but big-hearted film that its brisk duration leaves you wanting to spend more time hanging out with its feisty, funny, inspirational heroine.

Director: Adelina Borets
Screenwriters: Adelina Borets, Glib Lukianets, Marta Molfar
Cinematography: Bohdan Rozumnyi, Bohdan Borysenko
Editing: Agata Cierniak, Mateusz Wojtynski
Music: DakhaBrakha
Producers: Glib Lukianets, Natalia Grzegorzek
Production companies: Gogol Film (Poland), Koskino (Poland), DI Factory (Poland)
World sales: Gogol Film
Venue: DOK Leipzig film festival (International Documentary Competition)
In Ukrainian
70 minutes

Despite its independence and the establishment of a Kenyan state, much of the country’s land is still owned by descendants of the British, a trigger for tension between them and the indigenous Samburu pastoralists who raise their livestock on the open range. This tension has been a talking point in every election, but since the country has been ravaged by two years of drought, the scarcity of water has intensified the disputes between the the descendants of white British settlers in their well-guarded ranches and the semi-nomadic members of the Samburu tribe. It has also brought colonial history’s lasting impact back into focus.

Matziaraki and Murimi emphasize that the division created by Kenya’s colonial legacy is not simply historical. It lives on in the entrenched economic and social divisions that separate Laikipia’s white ranchers from the Samburu people, whose pastoral way of life has traditionally depended on these grazing lands.

The film’s strength lies in its delicate and nuanced approach to both sides of the conflict, humanising both sides. The film introduces Simeon and his family, Samburu herders for whom cattle are essential not only for survival but also as a symbol of their cultural identity. The film also introduces Maria, a fourth-generation white rancher whose family’s land represents both her legacy and livelihood. However, the filmmakers are not naive, nor do they shy from exploring these tensions. It is obvious that the brutal colonial legacy still remains present and today’s context cannot be seen without dealing with the demons of the past.

For example, we meet Tom, a white settler who controls around 60,000 acres on his estate. He remains romantic about the colonial image of wildlife in Kenya, a country he sees as the jewel of East Africa and home to the best safari trips, in a narrative that strips the indigenous citizens of their history. Matziaraki and Murimi’s decision to capture these discussions without comment allows viewers to witness the persistence of colonial attitudes toward land ownership and resource control. This one-sided conversation becomes a powerful reminder of the invisible walls that divide the two communities.

Though both Simeon and Maria share a sense of connection to Kenya, they live worlds apart, and their visions for the land seem irreconcilable. Through Sam Soko’s sensitive editing, their lives unfold in parallel, underscoring how different perspectives and unequal access to resources shape each side’s view of the land. Their unresolved histories and cultural divides prevent communities from finding common ground.

The Battle for Laikipia is all the more important in coming out as the earth gets warmer and warmer. A greater scarcity of resources in the future will clearly lead to more conflict and internal strife. Matziaraki and Murimi’s story goes beyond the context of Kenya and indeed East Africa, giving a wider guideline and warning about what could happen in other places of the world as well. Using stunning visuals and sensitive storytelling to capture the beauty and hardship of Laikipia’s landscape without clichés or sentimentalism, the film doesn’t offer easy answers but instead paints a poignant picture of a community caught between history, survival, and the challenges of an uncertain future. This patient observational documentary portrays a microcosm of broader environmental and social issues that are playing out in other parts of the world, avoiding oversimplification to leave the viewer with an understanding that the future of Laikipia — like many other places — will require solutions that reckon with both ecological and social realities.

Director: Daphne Matziaraki, Peter Murimi
Producers: Toni Kamau, Daphne Matziaraki
Coproducer: Maya Craig
Cinematography: Daphne Matziaraki, Peter Murimi, Maya Craig
Editing: Sam Soko
Music: William R. Fritch
World sales: MetFilm
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Audience Competition)
94 minutes
In Swahili, English, Samburu

Born in Switzerland, the director is the son of Palestinian immigrants, while his friend (who remains nameless in the film; see below) was adopted by a Jewish Swiss family. Despite their different backgrounds, the two boys grew up together, and ran wild and free as teenagers — until the latter decided to adopt religious Zionism and immigrate to Israel.

The film opens with Yagchi on a bus with several Israeli residents of a Yishuv, a Jewish settlement in Israel, where his boyhood friend is currently living. The initial plan for the documentary, as he shares in the first twenty minutes, was to examine the complications between two friends: a Palestinian and an Israeli settler.

That is why Yagchi is in Israel. Lending him “nice Arab” vibes, his Swiss passport and French language skills help him navigate the society inside the settlement where his friend lives. He spends time with his friend’s family, celebrates Passover with them, learns about Jewish traditions, and plays table tennis with the kids.

But despite passing for a nice Arab, he finds several aspects about this closed community that stand out. First, it is monitored 24-7 and heavily secured. But it is the sight of the deprived, impoverished Palestinian villages surrounding it that brings out the Palestinian in Yagchi. The shots taken by cinematographers Gabriel Sandru and Lukas Gut tell a lot, emphasizing the differences between the American suburb-style Israeli settlements and the destroyed Palestinian villages and refugee camps, which are separated from each other by a wall.

But what provokes Yagchi the most is his friend’s evident apathy towards the status of Arabs and Palestinians, who are only allowed into the settlement as workers after rigorous security checks. A falling out between the two friends occurs, along with the Covid pandemic. The friend is never named, nor do we see his face, which is blurred and unrecognizable throughout the film. And at a certain point he decides to jump ship and stop working on the documentary. Here Yagchi is transparent: not only has his friendship been dealt a low blow, but his whole documentary project is threatened. This vulnerability gives the film a very sincere tone throughout its 70-minute runtime, as he mourns a wrecked friendship, but also shows the findings of his research to his former friend.

And because there are no better problems solvers than documentary filmmakers, Yagchi makes the best out of a bad situation. The complications that arise, and Yagchi’s imaginative solutions, make this a fine piece of documentary work.

The second half of the film is dedicated to Yagchi’s journey to discover his family history in pre-1948 Palestine. His great-grandfather Khalil was a famous writer, journalist, and activist who took a leading role in demanding an independent Palestinian state. Yagchi travels to Israel where his house stood; it is now a hotel owned by an Israeli couple who arrived in 1949 after his grandfather was displaced. Yagchi even finds the books that were looted from his ancestor’s library in the National Library of Israel. They are now marked AP (abandoned property).

Yagchi’s mentioning of his grandfather’s story, the acquisition of his house, the looting of his books, and the erasing of his memory from the national memory of contemporary Israel, are followed by footage of how Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem are mistreated and displaced, and how villagers can easily be abused by settlers, all to signal a warning. Despite the heaviness of the topic, Yagchi’s humour surfaces in an animated reenactment he makes, showing his grandfather as an old man in a tarbush playing backgammon and puffing shisha.

A deep sadness and resentment can be heard in Yagchi’s final voiceover appeal to his friend: “Do you have the right under the pretext of searching for your identity to disregard mine?”

Director: Yvann Yagchi
Screenplay: Yvann Yagchi, Aurora Franco Vögeli
Producer: Brigitte Hofer, Cornelia Seitler
Cinemato­graphy: Gabriel Sandru, Lukas Gut
Editing: Selin Dettwiler, Christof Schertenleib, Christine Hoffet, Olivia Frey
Sound Editing: Massimo Del Gaudio
Sound Design: Massimo Del Gaudio
Re-Recording Mix: Jacques Kieffer
Music: Séverine Vaëna
Animation: Geena Gasser, Anja Sidler
Production companies: maximage, SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, SRG SSR
World Sales: Paul Thiltges Distributions
In Arabic, French, English
71 min.

Composed entirely of still photos aside from a very brief, achingly romantic live-action shot, La Jetée is a landmark in French avant-garde cinema, a dreamlike meditation on love, memory and mortality with a gut-punching time-loop twist. Despite its slender runtime, it remains a revered and influential cult film, most notably inspiring Terry Gilliam’s expanded semi-remake 12 Monkeys (1995).

World premiering this week in competition at DOK Leipzig festival, Cabrera’s documentary is very much its own creation, part cinephile essay and part poetic memoir, with an unashamedly niche art-house flavour. It is untidy in places, and unavoidably self-indulgent, but also charmingly quirky, moving and intriguing. Marker’s reputation should ensure this unorthodox homage finds a keen audience at further festivals and in cinematheques, particularly those where the clientele wear all black, smoke unfiltered Gitanes and exude existential ennui.

Most of La Jetée, the Fifth Shot consists of Cabrera interviewing her own relatives, tracking down Marker’s surviving associates, poring over vintage film clips and still photos, all in a bid to line up dates and locations from more than 60 years ago. She even visits Orly airport today to recreate the shot from Marker’s film that seemingly features Jean-Henri’s family. Slowly, forensically, she builds a pretty persuasive case.

In the process, Cabrera unearths some even wilder twists and coincidences. In one bizarre revelation, she finds that the male star of Marker’s film, Davos Hanich, grew up in the same Algerian neighbourhood as her own extended family. Furthermore, he may have had a youthful romance with the director’s aunt, which her parents sabotaged because Hanich was Jewish. Teasingly, Cabrera probes the possibility that her cousin Jean-Henri could actually be Hanich’s secret love child. The timing makes sense and the two men certainly share a physical resemblance, though any definitive proof is lost in history. “I feel a bit dizzy,” Jean-Henri laughs, “it’s like Vertigo.”

As it happens, Hitchcock’s Vertigo was one of Marker’s own obsessions, and helped inspire the hallucinatory dream-romance mystery plot of La Jetée. Cabrera weaves this element into her own free-ranging narrative, as well spotlighting the background impact of the Algerian War, which ended just as Marker was shooting La Jetée as a weekend side project to his more expansive, explicitly political Parisian panorama documentary, Le Joli Mai (1963).

Dead since 2012, the elusive Marker left few concrete clues for Cabrera to follow in this magical mystery tour though history. Born Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve to an upper class family, he was notoriously private and camera-shy, refusing to explain himself, hiding his identity behind cat avatars and multiple pseudonyms. Alas, the other key players in La Jetée are also gone – Hanich died in 1987, his co-star Hélène Châtelain in 2020. But Cabrera does manage to interview several of Marker’s later collaborators, including actors Catherine Belkhodja and Florence Delay. She even squeezes a few final memories from veteran cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, co-director of Le Joli Mai, before his death in 2019.

La Jetée, the Fifth Shot could use more journalistic rigour in places, notably by giving fuller context and clearer introductions to each minor player in this patchwork story. Some of Cabrera’s lateral-thinking hunches and speculations also feel a little flimsy. All the same, this sprawling family scrapbook of a film has an agreeably personal, idiosyncratic, passion-project flavour. It also features plenty of genuinely moving moments as the director’s relatives muse on their colonial-era roots, lost loved ones, and remembrance of things past. The closing scenes include a brief but lovely archive audio clip in which Châtelain pays lyrical homage to Marker. “His work is a never-ending metaphor,” she says, “and La Jetée is undoubtedly one of the strongest metaphors he wrote about himself.”

Director, screenwriter: Dominique Cabrera
Cinematography: Karine Aulnette
Editing: Sophie Brunet, Dominique Barbier
Score: Béatrice Thiriet, Oscar Turbant, Élise Bertrand
Producer: Edmée Doroszlaï
Production company, world sales: Ad Libitum (France)
Venue: DOK Leipzig film festival (International Documentary Competition)
In French
104 minutes

A fictional narrator (voiced by actor Jorge Gaviria) with a wide view of history and lyrical sense for myth and all of the paradoxes of human labour in this ancient environment of gradual erosion and transformations describes gold mining in Venezuela to us as an anthropological field report but also as a tragic story of survival, fragility and greed. New Yorker Chris Gude has already made several films in South America: Mambo Cool (2013) was about small-time drug dealers in Medellin, and Mariana (2017) depicted whiskey and gasoline smugglers on the Colombia-Venezuela border —  both films that, like Morichales, applied a poetic as well as political lens to themes of trade, desperation, and goods fetishisation. Mining in the Venezuelan Guayana is also highly dangerous, and the intensive toil carries unreliable returns for the workers who come by raft hoping to feed their families, their religious faith not always enough to combat their low morale, in a place where there is a hole so deep for reaching elusive deposits it is treacherously susceptible to noxious gases and is called Four Dead Men.

An almost mesmeric attention to the rhythms and stages of extraction amid the brown flows of mud and sluiced water, supported by a subtle, atmospheric soundtrack by Maximilian Gude, combines with delicate hand-drawings and maps, Bolex images and visualisation of the workings of quicksilver and other chemical elements that capture the beauty inherent in nature’s alchemy. But any romance humans have attached to gold mining is offset by Gude’s socially and existentially conscious concern for a forest unable to quickly replenish itself, and scant recompense for the labour of miners. The system of sale and reward, or “profits without glory,” reduces metal to an export commodity whereby wealth accumulates far from its origin for those who risk the least, as it passes to buyers and out of the country.

The whole territory is connected by water, and rains make the flows rise and fall in ways increasingly unpredictable as the seasons react to the climate crisis. The film takes its title from moriche palms, reminiscent of the Tree of Life of Pemon Indian myth, which it is said once had a complete inventory of fruit prior to it being cut down and water from its stump flooding with world and disseminating its seeds. Legends of such abundance are a stark contrast to the economic deprivation Venezuelans now face, but somehow buoy the continued efforts of adventurers to scour the terrain for lucrative discoveries, their mining a kind of never-settled demand to the land as a provider, which is never offered any profit back in the chain of consumption or nurturing for renewal. The booms and busts of the gold economy have been part of the region there since 1846, but as Morichales beautifully conveys, its frenzied cycle of hope and despair is terribly out of synch with the slow, ancient geological processes of the earth, and the time it takes for the burst of brightness of an exploded supernova to be returned to shining gold melted down into measurable form and clasped in a human hand.

Director, screenwriter, cinematography: Chris Gude
Cast: Jorge Gaviria
Producers: Chris Gude, Felipe Guerrero
Editing, sound: Felipe Guerrero, Chris Gude
Music: Maximilian Gude
Production companies: Chris Gude (USA), mutokino (Colombia)
World sales: Filmotor
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition)
In Spanish
83 minutes

The result is a raw, unashamedly partisan but highly engaging film, shining a light on a communal folk-art phenomenon that is largely unknown outside Brazil. This story has an unavoidably political subtext, with Dargis framing the baloeiro scene as a hotbed of anti-authoritarian underclass defiance, hence its outlaw status. Working in computer games as well as film, the director has also designed a game titled Cai Cai Balão, which casts the balloon gangs as swashbuckling heroes. Building on its healthy festival run, Balomania screens in Dok Leipzig this week in the program sidebar dedicated to Doc Alliance network nominees.

Rooted in Catholic church rituals imported by Portuguese colonisers, Brazil’s hot air balloon culture is a centuries-old tradition initially held every June to honour the Saints Anthony, Peter and John. Modern-day baloeiros still routinely perform The Lord’s Prayer to bless each launch, but the scene long ago assumed a secular cult-like dimension of its own. First blossoming in the impoverished favelas and working-class suburbs of Rio in the 1960s and 1970s, it then spread to São Paulo and other cities. The icons that these surreal, magical, man-made UFOs now celebrate are more likely to be fictional film characters, actors, musicians and athletes: Sylvester Stallone, Pavarotti and Freddy Kruger all feature in Balomania.

Banned since 1998 as a threat to public safety and the environment, the baloeiro crews are now routinely demonised by police and media as dangerous outlaws with criminal connections. Indeed, during filming of Balomania, the Brazilian government increased maximum potential jail time for balloon-gang members to eight years. But Dargis staunchly defends the groups as passion-driven hobbyists funded by their own money and sponsor donations. The only people profiting from the scene, she argues, are crooked police officers demanding bribes to look the other way and informers taking hefty reward pay-outs to snitch on their rivals.

With their painstaking collective dedication, visual panache and impressive feats of back-room engineering, the baloeiros come across here more like highly skilled outsider artists than criminals. Their illicit gatherings, cross-country chases and roof-jumping exploits have something in common with graffiti tag teams, train surfers or the underground army of dance music fans who attended illegal rave parties in late 1980s Britain. Their chief aim, as one veteran puts it, is to “paint the sky without staining the earth.” But outlaw status has made the groups increasingly paranoid, maintaining an intense wall of secrecy around their membership and balloon launch plans. Despite her overwhelmingly positive approach, even Dargis herself comes under suspicion as a potential police infiltrator.

Balomania was clearly a personal passion project for Dargis, and has the messy feel of a chaotic love affair at times. Essentially a one-person film crew, the director’s shaky hand-held style and woozy, poetic voice-over may grate with some viewers. Emotionally exhausted after a three-year journey through this intense male-dominated scene, she leaves Brazil for her native Denmark, missing the launch of a gigantic balloon that she had previously billed as central to the story. But for all its rough edges, this is still a fascinating, gripping and accomplished debut, full of strikingly beautiful close-up footage of balloons taking flight, and heartfelt homages to revered baloeiro godfathers who died during the shoot.

Director, screenwriter: Sissel Morell Dargis
cinematography: Sissel Morell Dargis, Elisa Barbosa Riva
Editing: Biel Andrés, Rikke Selin Als, Isabela Monteiro De Castro, Steen Johannessen, Sissel Morell Dargis
Producers: Jesper Jack, Marie Schmidt Olesen, Marieke van den Bersselaar, Carles Brugueras, Marie Schmidt Olesen
Music: Aquiles Ghirelli, O Novissimo Edgar
Production companies: House of Real (Denmark), Polar Star Films Spain)
World sales: Cargo Film & Releasing, New York, USA
Venue: Dok Leipzig film festival (Doc Alliance Award)
In Portuguese, English
93 minutes

Sitting in front of a computer screen, she taps in the data of each client with businesslike attention, calculating destinations for their birthday trips where she claims that conducive astral configurations will allow them to readjust their life paths for optimal happiness and self-realisation. Luciana’s empathetic interest in those who come to her for help and no-nonsense nuggets of wisdom encourage them to open up and trust her, and make her appealing as the subject of Wishing on a Star, the new feature documentary from Slovak director Peter Kerekes, which premiered in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival, and which screens in the Audience Competition at DOK Leipzig. Jaunty music and a playful, lighthearted tone mean this glossily packaged spotlight on the esoteric maintains a skeptical, tongue-in-cheek distance. The film feels less meaty in socio-political import than previous Kerekes works, such as Slovakia’s 2021 Oscar entry 107 Mothers, about women with babies in Odesa prison in Ukraine, but it is buoyed by a charming warmth and gentle compassion for the human foibles and emotional struggles of daily life.

Luciana’s profession is officially in Active Astrology, but in her consultations she bears some similarity to a therapist or counsellor, as she provides a much-needed sounding board to bring the problems of her clients into more conscious perspective. Whether or not the cosmos is instrumental in the outcome, a solo holiday creates much-needed space for reflection, new experiences and a break from routine, enabling her troubled travellers to take stock and reevaluate their relationships and paths. Luciana herself admits limits to her ability to alter her clients’ destinies, describing people as creators of their own fate, rather than simply puppets on strings, who are ultimately responsible for their own minds and wills. Several of the clients we meet in her office are women who feel stuck, with little sense of agency over their lives, and the sessions are instrumental in nudging them out of their comfort zones.

A woman whose sense of dutiful companionship towards a domineering mother has prevented her from having her own children baulks at jetting off to Barbados, but after her parent passes away, she breaks habits — and the law — with a chilly dip closer afield in a Croatian lake. Another unfulfilled woman has maintained a keen passion for her field of studies, Cultural Heritage, but her butcher husband, who is eighteen years older, does not support her interest, and she is desperate to overcome her feelings of neglect and reignite the spark in their marriage. She can’t afford to go to Anchorage, her assigned destination, physically, so she is tasked with recreating Alaska in her own home as a “psychomagic act” of visualisation, complete with a giant stuffed polar bear, bowls of ice, and a makeshift igloo. The source of her tears is also shot in his workplace. In this hybrid docufiction, dramatic interactions and disclosures feel safely pre-agreed and scripted, but in a manner which creates sensitive space for considering imperfection, dissatisfaction and forms of unhealthy co-dependence as a common challenge of long-term bonds and family experience. From Taipei to Beirut, others hoping for inspiration from the universe jet off without hesitation, and the camera checks in on them.

Some of Luciana’s clients appear to have been included due to their quirkier situations, which at times incorporate the role of the uncanny and chance, lest we become too cynical about unknown cosmic forces. A funeral director who sees the dead is under pressure to marry and produce an heir to the family business, for instance; meanwhile two twins in matching outfits need to disentangle conflicting plans for a joint future and offspring. Luciana has a question mark over her own future, as she dreams of returning to Naples, reinforcing the old adage that it’s easier to advise others, than steer one’s own ship.

Director: Peter Kerekes
Screenplay: Erica Barbiani, Peter Kerekes
Producers: Erica Barbiani, Lucia Candelpergher
Cinematographer: Martin Kollar
Editor: Marek Sulik
Music: Lucia Chutkova
Sound: Michal Gabor
Production companies: Videomante (Italy), Kerekesfilm (Slovakia), Radio and Television of Slovakia (Slovakia), Artcam Films (Czech Republic), Mischief Films (Austria), Restart (Croatia), Volos Films (Italy)
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Audience Competition)
In Italian
99 minutes

The German director’s previous works include documentaries about artists who sculpt using the natural environment and elements (including River and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time and Leaning into the Wind (2017) on Andy Goldsworthy, and Breathing Earth (2012) on Susumu Shingu). For Tracing Light, he brings two creative duos who work with light into conversation with physicists in Great Britain and Germany. Blending footage of immersive installations and site-specific art with impressive imagery of the unbeatable visual displays of nature itself, he also involves exchanges from within high-tech research centres that lean into the rigorously explanatory. Thankfully, the latter only serve to deepen the mystery around light as an elusive and unknowable phenomenon.

At the Advanced Research Centre at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, who make up the artistic duo Semiconductor, meet up with Daniele Faccio, a  professor of Quantum Technologies who is leading an “Extreme Light Group” of researchers, to pick his brain on light, speed and time. Meanwhile, at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen in Germany, a futuristic-looking tower of white walls, Johannes Brunner and Raimund Ritz, who collaborate together as Brunner/Ritz, are treated to a game of laser table football by scientists they have come to quiz about the properties of darkness. The documentary is not overly weighed down by the nerdily didactic, because as soon as we may start to feel like we are back in a school lab, glints of surrealism courtesy of the sheer mind-bending quality of quantum physics buoy the dialogues again. These range over whether the information gathered by photons is lost when it enters a black hole, how optical clockworks can measure time more precisely, and analogue television static as the carrier of fragments of ancient light that tell us about the early days of the universe. One researcher even clutches a red-lit skull, as he declares the use of light to look inside the human brain the holy grail of neurobiology.

Light’s everyday beauty punctuates the sequences from the number-crunching hubs of science, in the form of imagery that might be generic, but never gets old: illuminated snowfall, moonlight on water, and prismatic reflections of April sun rays from a mirror on a staircase. Multiple artworks using light are also featured. A quick dive is made into London’s Thin Air immersive art exhibition, and inside a laser and phosphorous particle installation by Robert Henke. Riedelsheimer jumps from country to conversation to project, carefully labelling each interaction but never leaving us much space to sit with huge ideas and work built for contemplation. More sustained time is afforded to artist Julie Brook, whose sculptural work within natural landscapes includes breathtaking firestacks constructed between tides that flame bright against the sea in the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. Atmospheric soundscapes by Fred Frith and gabby fluke-mogul support Riedelsheimer’s obvious appreciation of out-there thinking and boundary-pushing experimentation.

By the film’s end, and many reality-bending quantum nuggets from the ARC’s staff to chew, Jarman says that her understanding of light has only become more complicated. It’s a realisation there for us to enjoy along with the director, in a documentary that opens with a quote from Albert Einstein about mystery being the most beautiful thing at the heart of art and science. Light’s duality of particles and waves makes it difficult to measure, and defies attempts to understand it, the scientists all admit, but they don’t seem to mind — just as we are relieved when cinema retains its magic, and our fascination never has to end.

Director, cinematographer, editor: Thomas Riedelsheimer
Producers: Thomas Riedelsheimer, Sonja Henrici
Music: Fred Frith, gabby fluke-mogul
Production companies: Filmpunkt GmbH (Germany), Sonja Henrici Creates (UK)
World sales: New Docs
In English, German
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Opening Film)
99 minutes

In his opening speech, DOK Leipzig festival director Christoph Terhechte stressed the importance of film as a platform for discussion, debate and fruitful disagreement. “We firmly believe that cinema allows us to tolerate opposing viewpoints and enables dialogue between them,” he told the assembled audience of local dignitaries, film-makers and industry insiders. “Only by doing this can we can come together to promote peace and coexistence.”

Billing itself as the word’s oldest documentary festival, with a growing sideline in animation and more experimental visual artworks, DOK Leipzig certainly has a long history as a showcase for critical voices and free-thinking debate. It began life in 1955 under East Germany’s old Communist regime, launched partly with the intention to show that Eastern Bloc nations could also handle a diversity of views. With delicious irony, it was subsequently banned several times for failing to follow the official Party line. Even films from socialist “brother” countries like Poland and Yugoslavia were sidelined when they dared to take an overly independent stance. Three decades later, Leipzig played a crucial role in the peaceful protests that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Given the resurgence of volatile Cold War tensions between Russia and the West, it makes sense that DOK Leipzig has returned to the cultural frontline in recent years, this time fighting a new tyrant in the Kremlin. The festival program this year includes multiple films that challenge Moscow rule, both then and now: films like Tomasz Wolski’s excellent found-footage portrait of Poland under martial law, A Year in the Life of the Country, and Elina Mikaberidze’s emotionally charged Blueberry Dreams, an intimate study of precarious lives in modern-day Georgia, which is currently struggling against Russian military and political domination.

In light of the ongoing horrors of the war raging between Israel and Palestine, films informed by the conflict also pack extra punch in Leipzig. Tal Barda’s I Shall Not Hate is a a richly layered portrait of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, a feted Palestinian gynaecologist working in an Israeli hospital, while Yvann Yagchi’s There Was Nothing Here Before examines the painful growing rift between the Swiss-based Palestinian director and his Jewish best friend. Both are screening in the festival’s Audience Competition section

Closer to home, DOK Leipzig’s latest German Competition strand includes nine features, all world premieres, and almost all directed by women, covering subjects that veer from playful to political to deeply strange. While Sabine Herpich’s Barbara Morgenstern: Doing It for Love serves up a charmingly quirky pop-singer bio-doc, Jennifer Mallmann’s Moria Six dissects the legally troubling case of six young men charged with starting a fire at a Greek refugee camp, and Kristina Shtubert’s Abode of Dawn explores a messianic religious community deep in the Siberian wilderness.

Beyond the main screening program, the festival’s more experimental, immersive, VR and AR sidebar DOK Neuland has also been expanded this year, with digital artworks and installations now scattered across four different locations around the city. A hotly anticipated highlight of this program is Nothing Can Ever Be The Same by Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes, which began life at the Venice Biennale as a 168-hour “generative” audio-visual collage drawing on the video archive and creative methods of veteran avant-rock composer Brian Eno.

Hustwit later distilled this material into his innovative shape-shifting biographical documentary Eno, which premiered at Sundance in January. But now a newly condensed remix of the original sense-swamping artwork will be screening in an art gallery in Leipzig’s southern suburbs all this week, slimmed down to a relatively modest six-hour runtime. A lively crossroads between pop and politics, art and activism, debate and dissent, DOK Leipzig is always one of the most stimulating events in the film festival calendar. A week of blazing autumn colours and sparky critical voices, both on screen and off, lies ahead.

This topic may sound bleak on paper but Marching in the Dark proves to be an absorbing, moving, elegantly shot and surprisingly life-affirming film. It also has a sharp political agenda, exposing the shockingly lowly status of widows in much of India. This rousing feminist angle should help it find an audience beyond local and specialist interest groups. Fresh from earning a Special Mention from the Zurich Film Festival jury, it screens at Dok Leipzig this week in the Audience Competition section. It has also been shortlisted in the Best Documentary category for the European Film Awards, which take place in Lucerne on December 7.

The central protagonist of Marching in the Dark is Sanjivani Bhure, a 33-year-old widow in rural Maharashtra whose husband took his own life eight years ago. Like thousands involved in farming, the pressure of mounting debts, collapsing food prices and deepening depression simply became too heavy a burden for him. Left behind with two young children to raise, Sanjivani is now living on her brother-in-law’s family farm, scraping a meagre living by working for him, supplemented by occasional freelance jobs.

Surjan paints a quietly devastating picture of Sanjivani’s fate, and by extension that of millions more women in her position. Despite being legally responsible for her late husband’s debts, she does not fully inherit his property, Indeed, widows in India typically need a male relative to handle official financial matters related to their bereavement. Relegated to semi-invisible outcast status by social and religious norms, these women risk ostracism if they attend celebratory gatherings, retain their wedding jewellery, or have the audacity to remarry.

But Sanjivani is quietly challenging these conservative conventions, defying society’s low expectations of her by taking educational exams and pursing a part-time job assisting at a medical clinic. Unbeknownst to her disapproving extended family, she also sneaks away to attend a grief counselling group run by the Manaswini Foundation, an NGO with a mission to support, empower and educate underprivileged women and girls.

These collective discussion scenes are the least overtly dramatic in the film, but they crackle with pent-up anger and latent political energy. It is here that Sanjivani and her fellow widows share not just emotional support but a mounting resentment towards the patriarchal double standards that have amplified their family tragedies. While they mourn menfolk who often drank heavily, cheated and abused them, they remain stoic mothers and breadwinners, juggling childcare and huge financial challenges. “Stop crying and start fighting,” one woman tells her fellow survivors. “You have to live for yourself,” another proclaims. “So what if he’s gone? You only get to see this world once!”

Some of the closely observed conversational scenes in Marching in the Dark feel almost too dramatically convenient, as if they were scripted and staged. Even so, Surjan handles most of these interactions with great sensitivity, a healthy level of journalistic detachment, and a keen eye for visual poetry. Precisely composed static shots of candlelit interiors, dusty fields at sunset, and starkly beautiful rural landscapes lend this production an elevated art-house look.

The film’s pro-feminist message is also pleasingly free of simplistic polemic, and tempered with empathy for the wider victims of this ongoing economic tragedy. While the women and their struggles remain centre stage, Surjan also shows male farmers reacting with rage, frustration and despair at their latest crop failures and ruinously low prices.

Impassive and soft-spoken, Sanjivani is Surjan’s secret weapon in humanising this dark, dry subject matter. Her beatific face proves magnetic on camera, emoting wordlessly, radiating quiet determination behind her Mona Lisa smile. Marching in the Dark is dedicated to the 400,000 grieving women affected by farming suicides in India over the last 20 years.

Director, screenwriter: Kinshuk Surjan
Cinematography: Leena Patoli, Carl Rottiers, Vishal Vittal
Editing: Joëlle Alexis
Producers: Evelien De Graef, Hanne Phlypo
Sound: Puneet Dwivedi, Imtiyaz Jumnalkar
Sound design: Mark Glynne, Olmo van Straalen
Production company: Clin d’Oeil films, Belgium
World sales: Lightdox, France
Venue: Dok Leipzig Film Festival (Audience Competition)
In Marathi
109 minutes

Freewheeling and impressionistic, A Year in the Life of the Country is not a definitive account of this national trauma, a period already well covered in dramatised films and documentaries. But it is a lively, snappily edited mix-tape affair that serves as both history lesson for viewers too young to remember these events first hand (including Wolski himself) and a dark mirror on current geopolitical turbulence in Eastern Europe. As such, it should have broader audience appeal than a more formal, scholarly work might have. World premiered at Krakow Film Festival, where it won the Silver Horn prize, it screens at Dok Leipzig later this week,

The imposition of martial law was a major trauma for Poland and, in retrospect, an early warning sign that Communist Russia’s grip on its central European satellites was weakening. Panicked by deepening social and economic unrest, mass strikes and the growing power of independent trade union Solidarity, this nationwide crackdown by Poland’s military junta initially pacified the population. But not for long. In 1983, Solidarity co-founder Lech Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while serving a jail term on trumped-up charges. Less that a decade later, the Soviet Union imploded and Walesa became Poland’s first democratically elected president.

Inevitably, Walesa is a major presence in Wolski’s freewheeling patchwork film, his whiskery grin popping up in numerous clips of his impromptu news conferences, his police interrogations, his spell behind bars and his release to a rock star’s welcome. Another recurring figure is former Polish authoritarian ruler General Wojciech Jaruzelski, notably his declaration of martial law on state television in December 1981, when he warned that Poland was “on the edge of the abyss”. This clip includes backstage studio glitches and fluffed lines, previously unseen cracks in Jaruzelski’s implacably stern public facade.

But Wolski’s favoured method is to “run away” from well-documented facts to find the smaller, idiosyncratic, often comically absurd human stories behind the headlines. Thus between footage of striking steelworkers, military patrols and granite-faced Party officials we see random street-life scenes, bare-shelved shops selling baby chicks in place of shoes, a British news reporter stumbling over his lines, and other quirky vignettes. Mostly we glimpse ordinary citizens, students, fresh-faced army recruits, workers and housewives complaining on camera about a range of related topics, from serious to trivial, from censorship and food shortages to inconvenient TV scheduling.

Cross-cutting fluidly between colour and monochrome, professional newsreel and amateur video, Wolksi edits A Year in the Life of the Country together with an elastic, jumpy rhythm that he likens to free jazz, a comparison reinforced by Jerzy Rogiewicz’s percussive, kinetic score, That said, this is one of the director’s more formally conventional films, its observational mosaic of vintage footage presented without editorial commentary or firm narrative shape. Only the post-production audio track, added to lend an extra layer of eyewitness immediacy, are a subtle but effective piece of embroidery. This technique has echoes of Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitza, for whom Wolski has worked in as editor. Indeed, Loznitsa is acknowledged in the credits here.

Wolski’s zippy, scattershot, time-jumping approach is one element that makes A Year in the Life of the Country feel fresh and engaging rather than a dusty museum piece. At a crisp, densely packed 85 minutes, there is simply no time for viewers to get bored. Another key hook factor are the timely contemporary echoes in an era when Russian imperialism has returned with a vengeance in Ukraine, Georgia and beyond.

The film shifts gear in its sombre closing section, an extended montage of public protests across Poland and the routinely violent police backlash against them. These images strike a universal chord: they could be Prague or Chicago in the late 1960s, Belfast in the 1970s, Syria or Iran today. But the most obvious modern parallels are with Putin’s resurgent Russian empire: a militarised realm of censorship, tyranny, state propaganda and brutal repression of opposition voices. “Nobody could have guessed this regime would return,” Wolski said recently, “this time wearing a different mask.” A Year in the Life of the Country is an ancient story that feels disturbingly modern in places.

Director, screenwriter, editing: Tomasz Wolski
Music: Jerzy Rogiewicz
Producer: Anna Gawlita
Production company: Kijora Film, Poland
World sales: So Films, Poland
Venue: Dok Leipzig festival (Panorama: Central and Eastern Europe)
In Polish
85 minutes

“This will be a paradise,” declares Soso, a retired engineer whose stoic optimism buoys his family as they lay the foundation to make their fortune, or at least a living, from blueberries. They have mortgaged everything they have and staked their livelihood on the state’s Plant the Future funding programme, which provides loans for farms on previously uncultivated land. He and his wife Nino are well aware of the risks of growing fruit in a highly unstable location in which a military flare-up could happen at any moment, and there is no financial buffer for a failed harvest. Colour-drenched billboards from the Bank of Georgia, in which a hand proffers a bouquet of ripe produce, declare loftily that “belief” is the most important thing — a propagandistic plug for sheer willpower in entrepreneurship that glosses over a lack of hands-on training or practical assistance on the ground. Instead, the Meladze family consult online tutorials on their handheld phones to glean any knowhow they can on the berry business. Their home on the plantation is also little more than a construction zone, as they start from next to nothing, with the questionable assurance of a distant government’s promises their only guarantee. The Christmas fireplaces are cosy and the family are always quick to laugh, but these are no magic talismans against the pressure of bills, and rising interest rates.

Power cuts are a frequent reality. These point to the unreliability of the wider infrastructure, and trigger memories for the family of 2008, when Russia invaded, backing separatists and internally displacing Georgian civilians, who have still not managed to return. (This background is succinctly explained for international audiences in dialogue that comes across as more scripted than in relaxed domestic moments, but not stilted.) Nino was scheduled to give birth by Caesarean section to Giorgi when the war started, and the sound of tanks replayed in her head long after. Trauma is never far from the surface for the Meladzes, especially now that Russian troops are in such close proximity, and the TV broadcasts news from the ongoing war in Ukraine into their living room at night, a conflict in which imperialistic aggression also came under the guise of protecting Russian inhabitants. The kids discuss Putin’s authoritarianism between themselves, their absurd, mythologised patchwork of overheard information amusing on the surface, but revealing the inescapability of the politics of terror even in their inexperienced universe.

Blueberry Dreams is just as much, if not more, about the Meladze children, teenager Giorgi and ten-year-old Lazare. An observational camera glides around with them as they explore, riding their bikes or looking for tiny snakes in the well. They are alive with the curiosity of youth, as they get to know the place — but whether this makeshift, unformed and contested territory can ever feel like a secure home for them is perhaps the largest question in the film. Soso expresses a vision that they will in turn build a bigger house on the land; his sons’ ambitions are less defined. Lazare has dreams of becoming an artist, but Giorgi is more ambivalent about whether to go abroad and study, becoming part of the nation’s brain drain, or to follow in his father’s footsteps as a farmer. The family stays resolute in their support for one another, but the wider future of Georgia, which their paths will hinge on, is a question mark. This is a documentary that remains slimly sketched, but offers its socio-political insights with a big heart and a lightness of touch. Georgia’s ongoing political turmoil has pushed it high on the global news agenda, surely increasing international interest further.

Director, screenwriter: Elene Mikaberidze
Cast: Giorgi Meladze, Nino Meladze, Lazare Meladze, Soso Meladze
Producer: Elene Margvelashvili
Cinematographer: Patrick Wendt
Editors: Philippe Boucq, Yennick LeroyProduction companies: Parachute Films (Georgia), Wide Studios (France), Iota Production (Belgium)
Sound design: Marco Pascal
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Audience competition)
In Georgian, Russian
75 minutes