The festival opened a day after a brutal ongoing war erupted between Hamas and Israel, leaving thousands of casualties on both sides. Inevitably this inflamed highly polarised opinions on the 75-year-old conflict all across the world, including in Leipzig. The French-Palestinian film Bye Bye Tiberias, which examimes the trauma of exile on four generations of Palestinian women, told and shot beautifully by Lina Soualem, had two almost sold-out screenings at the festival. The film drew a lively crowd speaking Arabic, Hebrew, and German, who hoped for a Q&A with Soualem but sadly the director was not present.

Speaking to The Film Verdict, Soualem said she was concerned about the German premiere as news reports and police statements from other German cities confirmed a legal ban on any Palestinian solidarity protests. In Leipzig, close to the Cinemaxx complex where Bye Bye Tiberias was screened, the main train station witnessed rival pro-Palestine and pro-Isreal marches with several hundred riot police present, including cavalry and water cannon. Although both ended peacefully, there were arrests at similar demonstrations in Berlin.

As last year, war in Ukraine is still an urgent theme at DOK Leipzig. The festival’s bold choice of opening film this year was Arndt Ginzel’s The White Angel – The End of Marinka, which features heavy use of graphic GoPro footage shot by an evacuation team in Eastern Ukraine. There was also a lively panel about independent Belarusian film-makers in exile, working in resistance to a regime that has cracked down on free expression and allied itself with Putin’s invasion. These program choices felt especially bold during a time of political turbulence in Germany, when funding for Ukraine is increasingly under public scrutiny.

Indeed, provocative statements about exile and immigration were prominent across the Leipzig program. Winning the festival’s Golden Dove for best German documentary feature this year, plus three more awards, was Jonathan Schörnig’s One Hundred Four, a real-time film depicting the heroic exploits of a rescue vessel saving 104 migrants from a sinking boat in the middle of the Mediterranean sea. The timing could hardly be better for this film to be screened in Germany, and hopefully more widely across Europe. Two weeks ago, Elon Musk criticised the work of rescue ships being operated by German humanitarian groups, earning a chorus of right-wing approval, including from Germany’s populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Schörnig’s prize-winning film is a righteous rebuttal to Musk and his supporters.

DOK Leipzig’s other big Golden Dove prize-winners this year include Hovhannes Ishkhanyan’s Beauty and the Lawyer, an intimate chronicle of an LGBTQ+ couple’s fight for their rights in socially conservative Armenia, and Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies, a formally inventive investigation into historical injustice using hand-made puppets. But even in these turbulent times, the festival’s overall outlook was not all doom and gloom.

The Golden Dove for best international documentary went to Peter Mettler’s Where The Green Grass Grows, a lyrical three-hour meditation on family and memory that unfolds like a marathon mindfulness session. Darkly funny Chinese directors also had a strong year, with the best animated feature prize going to Xu Jinwei’s droll depiction of Gen Z slacker lifestyles No Changes Have Taken in Our Life, and best short film award to Bo Wang’s An Asian Ghost Story, a delightfully bizarre docu-fiction yarn about haunted Chinese wigs.

This broad spectrum is crucial to DOK Leipzig’s emotionally and politically rich appeal. While the festival never shirks its responsibility to depict the worst of human behaviour, it also finds common connections in our shared humour, compassion and creative invention. Cinema can be a bleak window on the world, but also a life-affirming force.

Silver Dove Feature-Length Film
Beauty and the Lawyer
directed by Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
(Armenia-France)

Golden Dove Short Film
An Asian Ghost Story
directed by Bo Wang
(Netherlands, Hong Kong)

Special Mention
Zima
directed by Tomek Popakul and Kasumi Ozeki
(Poland)

Silver Dove Short Film
30 Kilometres per Second
directed by Jani Peltonen
(Finland)

International Animation:
Golden Dove for Feature-length Animated Film
No Changes Have Taken in Our Life
directed by Xu Jingwei
(China)

International Animation:
Golden Dove Short Film
Such Miracles Do Happen
directed by Barbara Rupik
(Poland)

German Competition:
Documentary Film
Golden Dove Feature-Length Film
One Hundred Four
directed by Jonathan Schörnig
(Germany)

German Competition:
Golden Dove Short Film
getty abortions
directed by Franzis Kabisch
(Germany, Austria)

Golden Dove in the Audience Competition
The Mother of All Lies
Asmae El Moudir
(Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar)

The Film Verdict spoke to Soualem at the DOK Leipzig festival. Her film is currently touring Europe and was selected as the Palestinian entry for the 2023 Oscars at a critical time in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as tensions and polarisation are at a peak.

The Film Verdict: What motivated you to focus your film on your mother and other women in the family?

Lina Soualem: Bye Bye Tiberias is a continuation of my first documentary film, Their Algeria (2020), which I filmed with my paternal grandparents Aisha and Mabrouk, who immigrated from Algeria to France in the 1950s and divorced at the age of 80 after 62 years of marriage. Through their story, I explore the story of exile and transmission through generations. In the first film, I am the granddaughter who wants to reconnect with the story of her grandparents in the context of the French colonization of Algeria, and the context of silence that existed as my grandparents never told us the story. I wanted to break the silence and find my place between the two countries, Algeria and France, where my family is from and where I was born.

And in Bye Bye Tiberias, I keep on exploring the themes of exile through generations despite displacement. This time, I do it as a fourth generation of Palestinian women who have influenced the world around them and have influenced my mother and, thus, myself. And I ask what my mother transmitted to me, and I go back to the source to see what has been transmitted to her. I am trying to explore exile but through my position as a woman in the family and in the line of women. Also the women in my family have been able to transmit and maintain their legacy and history alive through the power of relations between each other, despite displacement. I wanted to highlight their identities, strengths, and paths and struggles.

TFV: How was it to work with your mother as your subject, especially as she has a professional background with many years in the film industry?

LS: It was not easy at first to work with my mother because she is not used to documentary film settings as a fiction actress. She is more used to fictional sets, so it took a while for her to be at

ease in front of my camera. We had a lot of talks. I filmed for almost six years… But at a point, she understood what I wanted to do, and she let herself go with my process. And she trusted that even when I was looking for something, and I didn’t really know what to do, she let me explore.

TFV: Your mother has always worked in many films that deal with Palestine and the conflict. Did your conversations with her go beyond the merely family aspects? Did you talk about artistic aspects of the film?

LS: She was not part of the artistic process. She didn’t write or participate in the editing process. The artistic decisions were mine. She wanted to stay as a character as she is her own
life. She is not acting; she is herself.

TFV: Can you tell me more about the cinematography and camera work? There are shots near Tiberias, in houses, and open shots in landscapes. How did you coordinate the camerawork?

LS: The images in the films are a mix from different times. There is the historical black and white footage that I found in archives, my family footage, which my father filmed in the 1990s via VHS, super 8 footage from my family, and there are images that I shot myself in the first shooting there when I filmed my mother and grandmother together. Then, there are images which are the most contemporary time in the film. In addition, there was footage filmed by Frida Marzouk, a talented French-Tunisian DOP who worked in many great films, and I needed someone with me to do the filmmaking to give a different look each time of the filming. I wanted the landscape to appear differently so we could compare the transformation of the landscape over the years.

And after we had a process of color correction with Christophe Bousquet where we had these different sources of images and wanted to give a homogeneity and uniformity to all these images even though we jump from time and space to another time and space. The idea was for this jump not to be felt. The idea was to float and navigate between the different times and worlds without feeling it too much.

TFV: Your film world premiered in Venice last August and a North American premiere in Toronto in September, which seems like ages ago as rapid changes have appeared in Palestine. Your film is now being screened in Leipzig. It will play in other places in Germany where harsh restrictions exist against raising Palestinian flags or standing in solidarity with people in Gaza. How do you feel about this?

LS: It is great to see the film screened at both those two amazing festivals [Venice and Toronto]. I went there with my mother to defend the film, and it was really amazing, especially to meet the public and see the reaction and see people being able to connect with the stories of these women. Last Saturday [7 October], I showed the film in London BFI and in DOK Leipzig. I was rather worried about showing the film in these conditions and also because it is a moment of great tragedy and despair, and it was not easy to speak about something so intimate publicly in such a context. But I was very happy about the warm welcome of the audience in London and Leipzig. It gave me hope that the audience might have felt the stories of the women and their humanity, and this allows me to feel that the film allows them to give back the humanity that seems to have been deprived in the media. It is a bit difficult for me to know how the other screenings will go, but I want to keep believing in humanity. The main thing is for people not to have more losses.

TFV: Your film garnered grants and support from El Gouna, Doha, and AFAC (Arab Fund for Arts and Culture). Are Arabic platforms starting to become a major player in international funding of films?

LS: Many Arab film entities supported the first and second films. The Doha Film Institute and many pitching platforms in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco supported Their Algeria. Bye
Bye Tiberias also got support from the El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt, in the Amman Film Festival in Jordan, AFAC, and Doha Film Institute. So I think it is important to have all these
funds in the regions and all the other funds that exist to be able to fund stories that sometimes are not funded at first in the west, only after a first push from the Arab regions. It is important to have a diversity of funds so all stories can find support depending on what it is about and the interests it gathers.

Ramljak tells the remarkable story of an idealistic adventure in which 28,000 Dalmatian Croats moved to colonial Egypt, where they were resettled by British authorities in 1944, creating a kind of utopian communal society. After the fall of Benito Mussolini in July 1943, Nazi Germany launched Operation Achse to prevent an Allied invasion from landing in Greece. Fearing retaliation by the Nazis, who targeted communities with anti-fascist partisan affiliations, families from Dalmatia fled their homes.

A deal between Tito’s Yugoslav partisans and British forces, who at the time occupied Egypt, allowed Dalmatian Croats to be transferred in boats first to Port Said and then in train cars to eastern Sinai overlooking the Suez Canal. English infrastructural buildings, other refugee camps, and faraway military bases surround this vast sandy land.

Ramljak shows the community as it starts to receive vaccinations and to set up the tents they will live in. They begin to unite as a people by cooking dishes from home like goulash, singing partisan songs, chanting Tito’s name, and communal organizing with a leftist emphasis. The latter includes workshops, communal kitchens, newspapers, theatres and hospitals, giving indeed a blueprint for self-administration via elected bodies and central committees.

In this context of solidarity, the film’s subjects also remember how Egyptians were ill-treated and beaten by British soldiers, and how friendship and interaction took place between the refugee community and the indigenous members of a colonized nation. In some cases, they offer Egyptian workers conscripted for labour by the British both food and medical assistance, despite the fact that the army banned them from entering the Egyptians’ camp.

The archival slide show is divided into three parts, and each is preceded by an enactment of a partisan theatrical performance, shouting slogans and reading newsletters. The performances are by the Ensemble of City Youth Theatre from Split, a group formed in El Shatt.

Ramljak’s remarkable and professional use of oral history gives the documentary a strong ethnographic identity, carrying a narrative that was shared by thousands of refugees. He provides them agency as they tell their own stories, but also allows them to relive their youth, visiting very intimate moments and romanticizing the communal experience, sometimes in a humorous way.

Testimonies from survivors, who were children then, are told via voice-over, accompanied by rich and extensive archival footage of the Dalmatian Croats, from their fearful exodus in 1943 to their sceptical yet excited return in 1946. Ramljak’s engaging storytelling merges the photogenic archive footage with intimate testimonies, allowing the audience to grasp not only the subjects’ everyday life but also the struggles and debates that came up in the camps.

The community, however, did not return to Croatia as a whole. Babies were born, while 900 Croats were buried in El Shatt due to a medication shortage. The community and their dead are commemorated by a monument and a graveyard guarded by an Egyptian custodian. El Shatt is not only a hidden chapter in post-war Communist history, but also in colonial Egyptian history, along with many other foreign communities and ethnicities.

Director, screenwriter: Ivan Ramljak
Producer: Tibor Keser
Co-producers: Iva Plemic Divjak, Mladen Kovacevic, Suncica Fradelic
Cinematography: Boris Poljak
Editing: Jelena Maksimovic
Costume design: Nevena Caklovic
Sound: Vladimir Živkovic, Miloš Drndarevic, Hrvoye Radnic, Suncica Ana Veldic, Diitrije Duric, Sergei Sokolov
Production companies: Horopter Film Production, Kompot, Kino Klub Split
World sales: marcella@splitscreen.hr
Venue: DOK Leipzig Documentary and Animation Film Festival (International Competition Documentary Film)
In Croatian, Arabic
96 minutes

Play Dead! begins with a memorial dedication to the director’s father Irwin, also a diabetic, who died in 2022. Irwin features prominently in a brisk pre-credits montage sequence, initially healthy and cheerful, playing with his granddaughters, then fading away in a hospital bed. This scene plays like a warning to Lancit, the ghost of Christmas Future. He is also haunted by grisly memories of his uncle Harvey, another family member with chronic diabetes, who eventually lost limbs and eyesight to the disease.

In its opening stages, Play Dead! unfolds in relatively straight docu-verite style, with Lancit mostly engaged in domestic routine with his French wife Blandine and two daughters, Madeleine and Liora, Their conversations about his diabetes are often sidelined by unrelated background observations of their Parisian milieu: construction workers remodeling their apartment building, protestors running wild in the streets below, lyrically filmed outings to woodland walks and lake swims.

The director has a huge asset here in his two winningly cute young daughters, both natural screen performers. The girls are initially happy to play along when he begins processing his diabetes dread in the form of dressing-up games for the camera, but they gradually turn more reluctant, apparently unsettled by the underlying connection with their father’s real health issues. “I don’t want to do any more vampire and vampire’s daughter,” Madeleine confesses with a heartbreaking edge of apology. “You can do it with somebody else, or just you…”

These play-acting skits turn increasingly dark when Lancit moves from theatrical scary-movie kitsch to the more visceral, nerve-jangling language of body horror. First the hints are subtle: finding strange lumps on his skin, for example, or unspooling a freakishly long coil of string from inside his insulin patch. Later they take on a genuinely creepy physical dimension, his eyes becoming sinister blanks, his forehead oozing thick white goo, and more. David Cronenberg’s influence on his fellow Canadian film-makers should not be underestimated.

Without getting too deeply into spoilers, Play Dead! ends with a particularly bizarre docu-fiction chapter. Inexplicably abandoned by his family in their now-empty apartment, Lancit becomes entangled with a sickly puppet doppelgänger. On a logical level, it makes minimal sense, but as an unsettling projection of the director’s inner anguish, this is an inspired detour into nightmarish surrealism, with echoes of vintage ventriloquist screen shockers like Dead of Night (1945) and Magic (1978).

Less charitable viewers might find Play Dead! a rambling, self-indulgent and (literally) navel-gazing exercise. But this is an unavoidably personal film, more artfully assembled than it initially appears, with universal themes behind its singular case-study focus. Impressively sticking within his DIY home-movie format, Lancit manages to address some heavyweight truths here, about how illness and death are essentially real-life horror films, eternal human fears that helped spawn a vast literary and cinematic genre.

Director, screenwriter, cinematography: Matthew Lancit
Editing: Ariane Mellet
Producer: Simon P.R. Bewick
Sound: Jules Wisocki
Music: Etienne Nicolas
Production companies: Quilombo Films (France), Tajine Studio (France), Duplacena (Portugal)
Venue: DOK Leipzig film festival (Camera Lucida)
In English, French
80 minutes

Thirty-one miles away from the Libyan border and deep in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea, one of the world’s deadliest refugee routes, 104 migrants are stranded in a sinking rubber boat with no water or communication devices. Screening at DOK Leipzig, One Hundred Four (Einhundertvier) makes a timely appearance just as the European Union is considering dealing with the long-standing migrant crisis with harsher laws.

Since 2012, the coasts of Libya have been the kickoff point for the majority of migrant boats carrying dozens, and sometimes thousands, of migrants heading to Europe. Over the years, traffickers have used the country’s political and economic turmoil and its continuous civil war to intensify unorganized migration to Spain, Greece, Malta, and Italy. The UN and other international organizations have documented thousands of people who drowned silently in the Mediterranean, unable to reach shore or be spotted by rescue missions. In his film, which was shot in 2019, Schörnig tells the story of 104 migrants from Sudan, South Sudan, Egypt, Nigeria, and Chad who were given a second chance to live.

One Hundred Four starts as the rescue ship Elenora spots a blue rubber boat carrying dozens of migrants. The Elenora dispatches a smaller  motor boat, realizing the rubber raft is on its way to sinking. Multiple cameras — steadycams, GoPros, and mobile — document the process as a smaller boat escorts the migrants to safety aboard the Elenora. The motor boat crew, led by Clara Richter, communicates with the migrants in Arabic and English and ensures that they follow the instructions during almost four round-trips between the boats. When Richter approaches the boat to distribute life jackets, the refugees cheer with the relief of a patient in critical condition seeing medical assistance arriving. It is a strong emotion reflected in Matteo Garrone’s fictionalized account Io Capitano, Italy’s Oscar submission.

Schörnig’s editing decision, to feature all the feeds of the cameras consequently on the screen, intensifies the anxiety and tension, especially when the Libyan Coast Guard (ICG) shows up, notorious for harassing migrant boats and sometimes humanitarian vessels. The migrants are trapped between being detained in Europe or being sent into the infamous Libyan incarceration centers, where thousands of migrants have been reported to be abused. At this moment, the film humanizes both the migrants and the nine members of the humanitarian mission, as all are concerned for their safety from the ICG.

Fans of well-scripted and smooth-flowing documentaries might be put off by certain aspects of the editing, like the back-and-forth motor boat trips that transfer migrants from the capsizing boat to the Elenora. But it is in this no man’s land, where international laws, resolutions, and pledges are absent, that what remains are individuals’ decisions to assist those in dire danger. Through this, Schörnig, who can be seen in the cockpit of the Elenora, presents a fascinating journey that doesn’t end with the migrants’ physical survival. There is another journey till all passengers (crew and migrants included) must take to find a port that is willing to accept them, and where they can negotiate their way ashore.

Although visuals (in the form of amateur videos, news reports, and documentaries) of the atrocities in the Mediterranean are not rare, One Hundred Four is distinct in taking a clear stand against EU governments who are planning to intensify regulations to block migration and who support North African countries cracking down on similar trips. The film should attract interested audiences not only in Europe but also in the Middle East and North Africa.

Director: Jonathan Schörnig
Cast: Claus-Peter Reisch, Martin Ernst, Thirsten Sikalla, Gerlad Karl, Clara Richter, Georg Albiez, Kostis Plevris
Producer: Uwe Nitschke
Co-Producer: Adrian Then
Cinematography: Jonathan Schörnig, Johannes Filous
Editing: Jonathan Schörnig, Moritz Petzold
Production companies: U.N TV-Produktion
World sales: jonathan.schoernig@posteo.de, uwenitschke@mac.com
Venue: DOK Leipzig Documentary and Animation Film Festival (Out of competition)
In German, English, Italian, Arabic
93 minutes

It inhabits a space intersecting documentary and fiction, combining playful silliness and thoughtful investigation. It is about a late 20^th-century Asia in the midst of modernisation, about Hong Kong’s somewhat unique position between East and West, and about a realm that straddles the worlds of the living and the dead. Using a blend of techniques, from observational documentary to acted fictional sequences and archival newsreel footage – all unified by a lo-fi VHS aesthetic – Wang creates a haunting essay film that constantly subverts its own non-fiction credentials.

The film opens with city scenes from contemporary Hong Kong while a female narrator, speaking in English, sets the scene for our story as beginning in the 1960s. A woman working in a wig factory encounters an otherworldly presence – a wig possessed by the spirit of the Japanese woman whose hair went into making it. From here, Wang’s film takes in the history of wig exports in the post-war period, as an example of trade restrictions imposed on Communist China during the Cold War years. In this case, Hong Kong becomes the new hotbed for this industry resulting – according to the film’s supernatural narrative – in an increase in ghosts with long hair wandering the city streets.

Wang expertly weaves together the genuine socio-political elements of Hong Kong’s emergence as a wig production powerhouse with ridiculous pseudo-documentary sequences like a scientist explaining a new EVP device that can listen to severed hair and identify the language and homeland of the spirit voices bound to it. It makes for a film that is interesting in that it often makes even its more factual observations harder to take a face value, but it also creates an element to this story that gives a surreal spiritual aspect to the march of globalisation. It is redolent with the uncanny quality of a truly unnerving ghost story while engaging with a fascinating slice of Hong Kong’s recent history.

Director, screenplay, editing: Bo Wang
Cast: Zoenie Liwen Deng, Ruoyao Jane Yao, Zoe Tang, Michael de Ross, Sidney Vereycken
Producers: Ruoyao Jane Yao, Jia Zhao
Cinematography: Yavuz Selim Isler, Fai Wan
Sound: Jeroen Goeijers, Franco van Der Linde
Production: Vine Films
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Documentary Film)
In English, Cantonese
37 minutes

Pipa also narrates, his candid, personal impressions alternating with interviews of the rescuers and survivors conducted by the director six months after the team’s last mission. In conventionally composed, talking-head segments those who made it out of Marinka reflect on their experience of the traumatic last days in their hometown, and their hopes for the future. School janitor Natalya and her daughter Elena convey a strong spirit of cross-generational resilience, and an urge to rebuild. The doc’s cinematic and festival prospects are hampered by the television-oriented format and some unfortunate production choices (the intrusive music is utterly superfluous, as there is no need to augment the already charged, nerve-shredding tension). But as an unmediated window onto the current horror that Ukrainian populations under attack are experiencing, the immersive access achieved by the film is exceptional. This is not a film for the fainthearted. Driven by a journalistic intent to bear witness to the full extent of the town’s suffering, their graphic injuries and the psychological pressure they are under, Ginzel does not hold back on gruesome content and scenes of distress, which accumulate over the film’s somewhat long running time into a gruelling experience.

As the frontline moves to Marinka, the air fills with smoke and artillery fire from the ongoing fighting. We’re immersed in a chaotic and unpredictable, fast-paced atmosphere of dread, as Pipa and driver Rustyam travel back and forth to the town, transporting the few inhabitants that are left from its peacetime population of 10,000 to a safe zone over the border. The evacuation team’s hurried pick-up trips, arriving to the street numbers of houses they have received calls to evacuate, are most often met with a disoriented lethargy on the part of the evacuees. This provides unnerving insight into the unreality of war, as we see how those under bombardment have lost the ability to think logically or fully register danger. The basements of the local school and polyclinic serve as makeshift bomb shelters. The underground spaces, damp and dark though they are, are relative safety zones, where locals seem to shut down, and cling to the only sense of home they have left. Some argue that leaving would result in robbery; others say they prefer to wait and have their fates determined by destiny. The evacuation team’s firm persuasion sways most. Cluster munitions, mine explosions and shrapnel have left many wounded, and the team, not trained to give medical aid, do the best they can before shuttling the casualties out to hospital. In a particularly bloody and upsetting scene, they administer a tourniquet and try to calm a man with a leg injury, not daring to let him know yet that his wife was killed on the spot when a missile hit the kitchen where she was cooking.

The doc is assembled chronologically, and, as the weeks drag on, the mission largely changes to evacuating bodies of the dead. The destruction of the town advances, until it is a lifeless ruin. Pipa says he decided to film White Angel missions to document war crimes and in so doing assist in their future prosecution. Arranged into this documentary, the footage also becomes another, particularly searing reminder of war’s pointlessness and inhumanity as a force contrary to all signs of life.

Director: Arndt Ginzel
Cinematography: Gerald Gerber
Editing: Stefan Eggers, Guntram Schuschke, Annina Wolf
Producer: Martin Kraushaar
Music: Hans Henning Ginzel
Production companies: GKD-Journalisten (Germany), ZDF (Germany)
Sales: Weltkino Filmverleih
Venue: DOK Leipzig
In Ukrainian, Russian
103 minutes

Despite a few weak points, notably clunky dialogue and a disjointed narrative, Johnny & Me is rich in real-life background drama and superbly rendered visual sequences. It screens in competition at DOK Leipzig this week, the perfect festival platform with its rare joint focus on documentary, animation and politically engaged film-making. High production values and Heartfield’s globally feted reputation as an groundbreaking anti-fascist agitprop artist should ensure more festival bookings and niche audience interest.

Johnny & Me is loosely structured as an extended dialogue between Stefanie (Stephanie Stremler), a graphic designer living in contemporary Germany, and an animated cut-out version of Heartfield (voiced by Manuel Harder) that she creates in her studio, which subsequently takes on a life of its own. Stefanie is suffering a minor career crisis, distressed that her artistic endeavours serve no deeper social purpose than bland commercial propaganda. “There’s no point to my work any more,” she complains to her Heartfield puppet. “Your work made a difference.”

Of course, Stefanie’s first world problems do not really add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But they are merely here as a flimsy dramatic hook on which to hang the film’s main scrambled, time-jumping plotline: an animated bio-pic of Heartfield told in a visual style that mirrors his photomontage technique but with added stop-motion movement, multi-media texture, vintage still photos and live action elements. Rothe half-jokingly calls her style “2.5D animation”, but the meticulous level of DIY craftsmanship here is highly impressive. Full of witty and imaginative touches too: red wool used to depict blood, scrunched-up newsprint as scenery, minor characters depicted as flat cardboard silhouettes, entire cityscapes rendered in abstract but recognisable detail.

Johnny & Me is too vague on biographical detail and political context. For example, Heartfield and his siblings were abandoned by their parents in a woodland cottage in 1899, apparently a result of their father Franz running away from blasphemy charges, a life-changing episode that the film breezes through with zero explanation. In his later years, the artist remained strangely loyal to Stalin, even after his murderous reign of terror had been widely condemned on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and to East Germany’s repressive Communist regime, which treated him with deep suspicion for years due to his his decade of exile in London, even though he was there as a dissident artist whose name ranked highly on Hitler’s most wanted list.

Rothe could have worked harder to unravel some of these mysteries and contradictions in Johnny & Me, but she mostly uses her fantasy time-jumping dialogue sequences between Stefanie and Heartfield for simplistic, on-the-nose exposition. An ever-present score dominated by twinkly lounge-jazz piano also feels incongruously whimsical for such dense, serious material. That said, Rothe’s use of surveillance quotes from Heartfield’s East German secret police files is an inspired recurring motif, with two puppet government agents serving as tragicomic chorus figures, like clownish Communist Party cousins of Waldorf and Statler from The Muppets.

Director, screenwriter: Katrin Rothe
Cast: Stephanie Stremler, Manuel Harder, Dorothee Carls, Michael Hatzius
Cinematography: Thomas Eirich-Schneider, Richard Marx, Manon Pichón
Editing: Hannes Starz
Animation: Lydia Günther, Caroline Hamann, Tonina Matamalas, Anne-Sophie Raemy, Benjamin Swiczinsky
Producer: Gunter Hanfgarn, Andrea Ufer, Ralph Wieser, Sereina Gabathuler, Werner Schweizer
Sound: Stephanie Stremler, Manuel Harder, Michael Hatzius, Dorothee Carls
Music: Micha Kaplan, Thomas Mävers
Production company: Hangfarn & Ufer (Germany), Mischief Films (Austria), Dschoint Ventschr (Switzerland)
World sales: Newdocs, Germany
Venue: DOK Leipzig film festival (International Competition Animated Film)
In German
104 minutes

Taking as its basis a fairy tale popular in Malaysia and Indonesia about a clever mouse-deer named Sang Kancil, Zhang Xu Zhan’s strange, shimmering animation is a heart-pounding feast for the senses. Zhang is regularly referred to as one of Taiwan’s most exciting young artists and that is understandable when watching this vivid work which borrows aesthetic elements from the paper crafts of Taiwanese funeral ceremonies in the service of a wordless ballet infused with shamanistic energies and tinged by unusual magical realist details. Already a decorated award-winner, the film now competes in the animation competition at the 2023 edition of DOK Leipzig.

The story upon which the film is based is just one of many that feature Sang Kancil, a trickster figure similar to Br’er Rabbit. In this instance, the story sees him arrive at a river infested with crocodiles, where he uses his cunning to not only escape their rapacious jaws but also to convince them to unwittingly form a line so that he can hop from one bank to the other via their backs. In Zhang’s film, this same central plot plays out, but Sang Kancil is a human in a finely wrought costume and the whole endeavour seems to be a dream conjured, and viewed through, the splintered eyes of jungle-dwelling insects.

Accompanied by the chorus of increasingly fraught drumming, this strange ritual becomes almost like an action spectacular like the performer, bent double beneath the cloth mouse-deer outfit, is participating in some death-defying rite of passage. This effect is more palpable in moments of great peril when image seems to flicker in what transpires to be fragmented views of the same situation but slightly different circumstances – a youth in a different colour costume, or a river filled with giant crabs – hinting at the cyclic nature of such traditions. In the film’s surreal and ambiguous ending, a calm is shatteringly bestowed before a larger cycle seems to be alluringly initiated.

Director, editing: Zhang Xu Zhan
Screenplay: Zhang Xu Zhan, Chi Chun Feng
Producer: Yu Chu Chan
Cinematography: Zhang Xu Zhan, Kuan Yu Chen
Animation: Zhang Xu Zhan, Raito Low, Liang Lie Chen
Sound: Prairie WWWW, Zi Ming Feng
Music: Prairie WWWW
Production: Zhan Zhan Xi Qi Culture Co., Ltd.
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Animated Film)
No dialogue
17 minutes

TFV: How soon into the pandemic did you start shooting footage for The Standstill?

NG: “Very soon. Everybody who is doing documentary films, I think, immediately felt there is something going on and it would be necessary to document it. When did we start filming? It was in the third week of the first lockdown. That’s when we really got going. The first two weeks, we needed to organise ourselves and the kit and everything, but the third week was the first day of shooting.”

Is this a disaster movie? A warning? A film about human resilience and solidarity?

“To be honest, I see it as a film for future archives. When the pandemic overwhelmed us we all wanted to know: what is it? We were trying to find some examples from history, and the only example is the Spanish Flu, and there was nearly no footage around from that. So the idea was really just to document in the purest sense of the world, what was going on. How does a town like Vienna try to deal with this? How do people try to deal with it? What does it change? How do we get over it? In the beginning, there was no other idea behind it than to really preserve it for future generations. And then, of course, it changed and grew and got funded and now it’s a cinema documentary. It wasn’t intended like this in the very beginning.”

The Standstill has recurring characters and plot lines, did you approach it like a drama?

“I don’t think it’s a drama movie, but of course there is a narrative. But this is the kind of narrative that happened by itself. And this was very unusual for me, because usually when you start the movie, you have some ideas about the dramaturgical aspects of how you want to tell the story and understand stuff. In this case, it was very different. We were basically open for whatever would happen every day, and what would change every day. And this is how the structure of the film evolved. And of course, we were meeting people again and understanding which were the points that we would go again. But in the very beginning, I was just surprised and curious, and whatever was different was interesting. It took a while for this film for me to learn who would be the protagonists of the movie, also to learn what kind of period it would be. Because in the beginning, nobody knew.”

Some people interviewed in the film express an idealistic hope that the pandemic will change society for the better. I assume you take a more pessimistic view?

“At least I’m trying to be a realist. We were all hoping to return to the world like it was before the pandemic, but nothing is getting better. Things were changing so much. To be honest, the pandemic was over in the moment Russia attacked Ukraine, because then all the media had a new topic, and then nobody was talking about Corona any more. The world that we are facing now is a very different world than we were facing before the pandemic.”

Did the pandemic change you personally? Will it change the way you make films?

“Not at all. When I started shooting the film I was reminded of so many other films I have made. Nobody was in the street and everybody was really afraid, this reminded me very much filming in Chernobyl, like I did over 20 years ago. Then again everything felt very much like a hostile environment, it felt the war situation in Bosnia, empty spaces. So when I was starting to work on this film I was just myself with a camera. I was doing a job as good as it could, using all my expertise and knowledge just to do my part during this pandemic. Like others were working in NGOs or working in ambulances or doing whatever they could, helping people, and I was doing what I could, which was taking the best images that I could. Especially during the first lockdown, it really felt like working in an emergency situation because there was nobody in the street except ambulances and police cars with very few people. This was very strange.”

The Standstill, like all your documentaries, has very strong visual style. Is film-making more an aesthetic or a journalistic process for you?

“The aesthetic is extremely important, especially in the cinema. And my background is photography, so I simply couldn’t do it in a different way. But I also think that you can sit in the cinema, or in front of television, and see things and try to understand them, or you can sit in the cinema and see things but also really explore location and feel them, because you have the time and the atmosphere. Also you have the surround sound, which is usually the original sound. So you really get into the locations and become part of this. And this, I think, is a much stronger experience. I think this can drive you to start the process of thinking, because you experienced something, you didn’t just see something.”

You were rejected from film school three times. Has that been a burden for your career, or was it ultimately a blessing?

“Good question. In the beginning it was a burden because when I was really sure that I wanted to make films, there was no other way than using film equipment. And that’s what they learned in the film school: how to use an Arriflex camera, how to change the film in the dark bag, all this kind of technical stuff. That is what I would have liked to learn, and then I managed to learn it anyway. I still know many people from that period because I was in a film school, but not as an official pupil, I was more semi-official. But I was really pissed, to be honest. The first time I was rejected, I understood it because they were looking for feature film students and that was not what I wanted to do. The second time was the same, but the third time I was really pissed because they could have changed a little bit and become more open. By now it was a little bit more clear that documentary film has its place in the cinema.”

“So it was a burden in the beginning because I really had to learn a lot of stuff myself. But my background from photography helped me understood how the chemicals react, how to develop it, how to expose it, all this kind of stuff. And people keep telling me I would never dare to make films in the way that I do if I would have learned how to do it properly! I guess that is right. What I do is really very far beyond how you would learn to create a film in a film school. So, in a way, I’m grateful that nobody told me to do it differently because I would probably have never found the way that I’m working now.”

You founded your own film production company when you were 22, which is impressively confident. What was your motivation?

“Just because I wanted to get the funding and I needed a company. I didn’t want to go to one of the existing companies because I did not understand, if I really want to make a film, why would the company own all the rights? In the end, it was just a plan B to found your own company to keep the rights to yourself. But it was not only about the rights, it was really also about being independent, I didn’t want to be bothered by a producer who wants to see a result every day. So that was my way to go. And I’m very happy about this because I’m sure I could not make the films that I made, even today, with another company than my own.”

You have said you don’t like humans as a species, just as individuals. Did making The Standstill movie change this bleak outlook?

“I don’t know. The human species as a total is very unpredictable. Talking to people, even if you don’t share the same political opinion, you can find a dialogue. But with a mass of people who are against you, you can not. This is what I also experienced when we were shooting all these anti-lockdown demonstrations. I don’t want to say it was dangerous, but I didn’t feel very comfortable amongst them because they were really so angry against the media and against the system and against basically everybody. So shooting these demonstrations was probably more dangerous than when I was shooting back in Bosnia because people really had a big, big aggression. And sometimes I’m shooting this wide-angle photo from a higher position and ideally, the frame has to be in the centre of the street. So we had a big ladder and scaffolding in the middle of the street where the demonstration was coming towards us. We were really target because we couldn’t hide other camera teams. Nothing really happened, but I did not feel comfortable. People, when they are more than one, become unpredictable. There are dynamics that usually you don’t have when you talk to individuals.”

Making documentaries about major issues inevitably has a political dimension. Do you have political intentions when you shoot films?

“Even having a close look at something is a political act. With this Corona pandemic, it was not so much political, to be honest. It was more really describing unpredictable, severe circumstances. And usually, of course, you do the films because you want to… I don’t want to say because you want to change the world, because this would be much too naive, but maybe you want to contribute a very little bit to some fundamental changes.”

What is your next project after The Standstill?

“I started to work on another project, and then the pandemic stopped everything. But the film I’m working on now is about snow and ice. We all know the ocean will be rising but nobody has had a close look at where the water comes from, and what other parts of the world will change.”

Is the Covid-19 pandemic really over? In a few years now could you be making Standstill 2: Electric Boogaloo?

“Who knows? I mean, parts of India are in a lockdown because of another new virus. Maybe we will have to get used to things like this. Maybe it was just very good luck that nothing like this occurred between the Spanish Flu and Corona. Maybe nobody knows. But now, basically, the virus is still there and there are still people in the hospital. We just don’t take it seriously any more. Probably it is not so serious, But anyway, it’s not as long over as it seems. At least for me, because it feels like this is a film about an historic event which is way back. But it’s not way back. It’s just one of two years but it feels retro in a way. There is a nostalgic view of this already, which I find very strange.”

Beauty and the Lawyer opens with the marriage of Garik Amolikyan, a 24-year-old drag artist, queer rights activist and former sex worker, to Hasmik Petrosyan, a female lawyer who advocates for greater legal protections for LGBTQ+ people. Candid scenes of family life show a relationship of great warmth and irreverent humour, as they await the birth of their first son, Leonik, and Garik builds a new house for them, laying blocks for the home from the ground up. These casual domestic moments are set against archival television news footage of parliamentary addresses and vox pop that show just how deeply entrenched transphobia is among the general population and institutions of Armenia, even as the Constitution of the small Caucasus nation supposedly guarantees the equal right to a family life for all of its citizens. Anti-discrimination legislation does not explicitly name the categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, and bigots takie advantage of a general atmosphere of impunity.

This is an awareness-building doc that leans into a scrappy, grassroots DIY ethos, rather than high-production gloss. Though it would have benefitted from a more rigorous structuring hand, it has capitalised on the trust and access obviously inherent to a familiar team relationship (both the director and the protagonists are involved with the NGO Pink Armenia, where the couple are shown hanging out) to achieve greater visibility for a community marginalised from Armenian society and cinema. Neighbouring nation Georgia’s recent flourishing of queer stories on screen in the face of staunch resistance from the Church and traditional quarters of society has no doubt helped catalyse space for this project, in a region of strong religious taboos.

Garik appears on-stage as Carabina, in performances drawing on autobiographical experiences and theatrical outpourings of emotions that seem an essential means of processing the persistent threat and anxiety of living in a society in which the violent persecution of those not conforming to conventional gender roles is normalised. A tendency for playful, offbeat creative gestures and musical interludes vitalises even the most mundane domestic moments for Garik, who at one point breaks out into a song by famed French-Armenian chansonnier Charles Aznavour, What Makes A Man, while plastering the house.

Though their home is a shared place of comfort for the family, just what they are up against outside is evidenced in news footage of zealots from the Word of Life sect protesting against the “propaganda of perversion,” as they deem calls for LGBTQ+ rights, which are viewed by conservatives in Armenia as a corrupting western import from the European Union. One protester, making a throat-cutting gesture, produces a knife, which he refers to as an instrument for purifying this generation of Armenians, in a clear statement of violent intent toward anyone who falls outside traditional morality dictates on appearance and behaviour.

The decoration of a tree for Leonik’s first Christmas in the new house is both a hopeful moment as a vision of family achievable for all, but a bittersweet and precarious one. It occurs against a backdrop of the family considering asylum in the Netherlands, wanting their son to be raised with his freedom and rights fully protected, but fearing that might not be possible if they remain in Armenia.

Director, Writer, Cinematographer, Co-Producer: Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
Editor: Wei Yuan Song
Producer: Jean-Marie Gigon
Sound Design: Thomas Fourel
Production company: Sanosi Productions (France)
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition)
In Armenian
105 minutes

David Shongo starts his fascinating and sobering film with a quote from author and politician Aimé Césaire. Césaire’s observation is that the tragedy of African history is how, at the point in time that they first encountered the wider world, it was in the form of a Europe governed by “unscrupulous financiers.” The legacy of that fact is far-reaching and Shongo draws a line from this idea to the way that the Democratic Republic of Congo has been exploited since its first encounters with Belgian colonists. Through dialogues with various scholars, the film considers how mechanisms of control and export have stripped the Congolese people of their own knowledge and agency.

Shongo employs several forms and techniques, combining archival footage and photographic material with observational documentary, talking head interviews, landscape cinema, staged performance and voiceover narration. The bringing together of these elements can sometimes feel somewhat heady, but – vitally – it never compromises the film’s acuity. Recurring elements also aid with this, not least a central conceit through which interviewees react to a decades-old black and white photograph of a bare-chested Congolese woman. The responses to this picture are varied and each, in its own way, contributes to the overall sense of how such imagery has come to define the DRC’s past.

One man notes that the image appears shocking to modern eyes – though it would never have been thought of as such prior to the arrival of the Colonisers. Another man notes that the sarong that the woman wears would not have been traditional garb – so although this photograph seems plausible, it has been partly shaped by the taker. As such, the woman’s bare chest is an active choice, rather than an authentically incidental detail. Through the discussions of this and other images, this initial instalment of Lumene crafts a nuanced reflection on the ‘othering’ inherent in much ethnographic study, and how the ownership of the Congolese story no longer seems to inherently sit with its people. Shongo’s ongoing project feels like an urgent one to follow.

Director, screenplay: David Shongo
Producers: David Shongo, Nanina Guyer
Cinematography: Peter Miyalu
Editing: Derek Simba, David Shongo
Animation: Derek Simba
Sound: Djo Kita, Lenyema Okiteke
Production: Musée Rietberg de Zurich, Sutudio 1960
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Documentary Film)
In French, Lingala
30 minutes

World premiering at DOK Leipzig festival this week, Togoland Projections is a smart idea whose probing intentions and lightly experimental format are slightly undermined by its dry, dispassionate, detached delivery. With his earnest and sober approach, Ellinghaus never fully exploits the full potential storytelling spectrum of this playful, prickly dialogue between past and present, colonial and postcolonial worldviews. Even so, this absorbing time-travel history lesson should have connoisseur appeal in film festival and academic circles.

With Togoland Projections, Ellinghaus is literally following in the footsteps of early 20th century film-maker and adventurer Hans Schomburgk, who shot several features in Germany’s African colonies, many starring his future wife Meg Gehrts. Indeed, some the footage revisited here ended up in Schomburgk’s “ethnodramas” The White Goddess of the Wangora (1913) and A White Woman Among Cannibals (1921). But most of these archive clips, shot during an extended visit to Togo in 1913, are more like observational newsreels of ceremonial gatherings, the construction of a radio transmitter station, a kinetic display of Togolese calvary horses, locals working in borderline-slavery conditions, and so on.

In a smart piece of historical symmetry, Ellinghaus retraces Schomburgk’s journey around Togo, hosting public screenings and discussions of his film clips in makeshift cinemas, schools and municipal buildings. On encountering these antique visual documents of how their ancestors lived a century ago, Togolese viewers react with a mix of levity, bafflement, incredulity and anger. The lively audience debates that follow are far more interesting than the scratchy old footage. Some viewers share bitter memories of families crushed by colonial mistreatment, other remain cautiously positive about the legacy of German rule, notably roads and railways. In a fascinating but ultimately fruitless scene, a classroom full of deaf children attempt to lip-read the words of their ancestors from a silent screen.

Schomburgk’s lover, muse and travel cocompanion Gehrts helpfully kept a journal of their Togo trip, allowing Ellinghaus to include some first-hand narrative fragments (voiced by Manuela Weichenrieder) that lend the film a pleasingly personal texture. When she describes the oppressive gender imbalances that affect Togolese women using suffragette language, for example, Gehrts sounds like a surprisingly modern intersectional feminist. But in the next sentence she reassures herself that forcing these women to do hard, dangerous mining work is only a “mild form of slavery”. She also makes casual use of the N-word, which would have been the norm a century ago. Ellinghaus includes a trigger warning about racist language during the opening credits, but also rightly blanks out the word in both the audio track and screen subtitles. More revealing context is taken from the diaries of a former German colonial military officer, who weeps for his dead dog while coolly recording his official duties of plunder, pillage and genocidal violence.

A final screening session for a film club in the Togolese capital Lomé produces the most heated intellectual debate in Togoland Projections as impassioned young cinephiles deconstruct subjective viewpoints and clashing postcolonial narratives. Sadly Ellinghaus only treats this scene as a rushed coda. More commentary from politically engaged African voices like these would have added extra heft to a well-intentioned film which is, after all, largely concerned with reclaiming colonial history from the Eurocentric white gaze.

Director, screenwriter: Jürgen Ellinghaus
Cinematography: Rémi Jennequin
Sound: Caled Boukari
Editing: Nina Khada
Music: Eustache Kamouna
Production companies: Les Films de L’Oeil Sauvage (France), Maxim Film (Germany)
World sales: Andana, France
Venue: Dok Leipzig film festival (German documentary competition)
In German, Ife, French, Tem, Mina, Bassar, Kabiyé, Anufo, Dagbani, Konkomba
96 minutes

It is the time of year that this hugely expressive animation takes place, in a secluded coastal village – but the coldness and hardness that permeate the film are as spiritual as they are seasonal. The people of the village range from the taciturn to the violently hostile, an unremitting life shaping tough, unrelenting people. Amongst this populace is Anka (voiced by Nina Michnik and Anna Pyrka at different ages), who the film depicts both as a girl and a young woman, a more sensitive soul struggling to navigate her harsh environs.

We first meet Anka in a heavy metal-inflected prologue in which she gently tends to some newly born kittens before her father scoops them up in a sack and heads for the river where the two have a menacing standoff. The film uses animals throughout – symbolically and literally – to aid in its central conceit of needling at the wound of our ability as a species to be callous and caring in the same breath. The imperfect shapes and coarsely scrawled lines of the hand-drawn animation imbue the images with a similarly contradictory essence; one that in a single moment can seem to represent the diligent attention of the animation process and the carelessness of a crude sketch.

What the febrile and impressionistic nature of the animation also does is infuse every frame of Zima with, at times overwhelming, feeling. Spiky lines and morphing bodies create an urgent energy in a sledging sequence, the chalky highlights on the face of Anka’s father seem to glow with the warmth of the fire, and the roughly depicted eye of an animal transpires to actually be the island in the snow created by a dog chained to his shelter and pacing in circles at the end of his tether. In a film primarily cast in monochrome, splashes of colour are also achingly impactful – from the red of a thermometer charting their descent into winter or the ominously pink sky over the sea ice as Anka and her friend go skating at dusk. Beneath the surface they come across the bodies of cats, trapped in the frost, and we’re reminded of the bleak reality underlying even the most elegant of moments.

Directors: Kasumi Ozeki, Tomasz Popakul
Cast: Nina Michnik, Anna Pyrka, Bartosz Bielenia, Stanislaw Juskulka
Producers: Marcin Podolec
Screenplay, editing: Tomasz Popakul
Sound: Michal Fojcik
Animation: Tomek Popakul, Jakub Baniak, Alicja B?aszczy?ska, Micha? Orzechowski, Olga K?yszewicz
Production company: Yellow Tapir Films (Poland)
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Animated Film)
In Polish
26 minutes

The film starts with the chance encounter, in the Swedish town of Gullspang, of two sixty-something sisters from the north of Norway with a woman who looks identical to their sibling who died by suicide in 1988. DNA tests reveal a long-lost twin. The miraculous discovery and family reunion was meant to be the core of the documentary. What followed, as the past came under new scrutiny and the possibility of a murder and cover-up swam into the frame, neither Fredriksson nor the sisters anticipated. 

“At the beginning, I thought that it was a completely different film I was going to make,” said Fredriksson. The project had found her, not vice versa, after the sisters contacted a television broadcaster she has worked for. “I believed that everything exciting in this story had already happened, and that I needed to find a way to reconstruct and retell, much more than follow events in present time. But little did I know! The film changed shape and direction many times during the process.”

The eventful revelations and dramatic tensions within this eccentric family seem a gift for any documentarian — but as a debut feature project, it required Fredriksson jumping in at the deep end to navigate thorny emotions, existential questions of identity, and taboo zones of experience, not to mention wrangling a tangle of conflicting information into a coherent whole.

She said trust came easily with the sisters, and they “became close early on,” before difficulties arose. “They approached me with a lighthearted family reunion miracle story, and then it turned into something completely different, much darker. That was not what they wished for. But I’m happy to say that they love the finished film and are very proud of it. They all think it’s a very truthful and honest portrait of their story, which of course is crucial for me.”

Keeping her own presence transparently in the frame (“dramatisations can reduce the authenticity,” she believes), Fredriksson teases the audience with a buoyant theatricality and eerie elements of suspense, while never compromising the real human emotion of grief and the yearning to belong. “It’s important for me to always give space for playfulness in my films, regardless of theme or topic,” she said, crediting close collaboration with editor Mark Bukdahl, and composer Jonas Colstrup whose “expressive score” helped shape the tone.

As the investigation took on a life almost of its own, was it hard to know when to stop digging? “Almost impossible, actually,” answered Fredriksson. “I had been feeling it was my responsibility to find every answer to every new question that was raised. Then I realised that if the family wasn’t up for it any more, it’s their life and their choice. But lately they’ve said that they do want more answers, so we’ll see.” It’s the most Fredriksson will give away, when probed about the rumours of a pending sequel or series about the family that might be in the works. After all, if anyone knows how to keep a little mystery alive, it is her.

Geyhalter and his small team began collecting material for The Standstill in early 2020, just weeks into the first Covid lockdown. The director’s initial impulse, he explains in his DOK Leipzig press notes, was to document this once-in-century event for the archives long before he knew how the virus would impact on the future of humankind. Over two years, he amassed a huge mass of material, then imposed a loose narrative shape afterwards, partly though recurring interviews with schoolteachers, politicians, health workers, cinema managers and others. Some become steadily more hopeless as each new viral wave arrives, others see the pandemic as a potential invitation for humankind to slow down, re-examine our values and remake a better world.

There is tragedy here, of course. Hospital patients struggle with potentially lethal lung damage. Grieving loved ones barred from the funerals of dead relatives, whose coffins arrive inside anonymous trucks for cremation in chillingly empty industrial facilities. But there is compassion, solidarity and ingenuity too. Amateur musicians stage free concerts on apartment balconies, clergymen hold church services over Zoom, masked frontline workers bravely risk their own lives to help their fellow citizens. In counterpoint to all these stressed teachers and medical experts, Geyhalter also shoots the angry masses who attended various anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine protest marches in central Vienna across 2021. His highly visible elevated camera set-up drew hostile responses from the crowd, though he does not include that here, coolly observing with no obvious editorial spin.

The Standstill is a deluxe showreel of Geyrhalter’s immersive, hypnotic, oddly soothing observational style: strikingly geometric compositions, typically framed in static long shots from a raised angle, with prominent use of symmetry and plunging perspective. Even without the Covid context, this widescreen urban mosaic is awash with post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller imagery: a sea of grounded airliners crowding the runway at Vienna airport, deserted subway stations that resembled futuristic Stanley Kubrick backdrops, eerily empty overflow hospital wards inside grand exhibition halls. The director also makes striking use of those split-screen video platforms that flourished during the pandemic, incorporating clips of online lessons at his teenage son’s school, and elegant  travelling shots that glide through a depopulated Vienna in the depths of lockdown. The city’s iconic Prater amusement park, as seen in The Third Man (1949) and many other films, becomes a haunted horror movie set without customers.

Like the pandemic itself, The Standstill drags on a little too long as it lurches between terror and tedium, existential despair and mundane self-care, full lockdown hibernation and resurgent masked gatherings. The final act also feels a little flat and disjointed, ending abruptly with the World Health Organisation’s May 2023 declaration that Coronavirus is no longer a global emergency. There is no satisfying sense of closure here, perhaps because the virus is still with us, the final reckoning still not entirely clear. But these are minor wobbles in an otherwise absorbing, exhaustive and often disturbingly beautiful document of recent history.

Director, cinematography: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Editing: Gernot Grassl
Assistant director: Sophia Laggner
Sound: Sergey Martynyuk
Dramaturgical advisor: Claus Philipp
Producers: Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Michael Kitzberger, Wolfgang Widerhofer. Markus Glaser
Production company: NGF Geyrhalterfilm (Austria)
World sales: Autolook, Vienna
Venue: DOK Leipzig festival (International Competition Documentary Film)
In German
137 minutes

As we discussed last year in our interview with festival head Christoph Terhechte, those are the two cinematic storytelling forms that are – sometimes dismissively – mislabeled as genres, as opposed to creative modes within which multiple genres can exist.

Occasionally, the two forms overlap: Waltz with Bashir springs to mind, as does one of Leipzig’s 2022 entries, Alain Ughetto’s No Dogs or Italians Allowed. Ostensibly the film is a somewhat romantic comedy-drama about an Italian family’s struggles when work demands and the rise of fascism forces them to relocate abroad, but it is in fact a retelling of the life story of the director’s own grandfather, made via stop motion, and with Ughetto himself in the frame as he moves the props and puppets in between shots.

While not entirely similar in approach, Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies, playing at the festival this year, also accomplishes a blend of the two creative outlets. It was first screened in Cannes, where it won the Best Director award in the Un Certain Regard section (a detail that amused El Moudir, since part of the film revolves around her grandmother refusing to acknowledge her chosen profession as a filmmaker). It has been a hit on the festival circuit and was recently chosen as the Moroccan submission for the Academy Awards in the International Feature Film category.

Much like Ughetto last year, El Moudir, who spent eight years making the film, sets out to tell her own family’s history. And in the absence of any proper visual archive, she decides to create her own, constructing a miniature replica of her neighborhood and populating it with figurines, all made with help from her father. It is not strictly speaking animation, certainly not as most viewers would perceive it, but the process does have echoes of the stop motion world, as the director resorts to miniaturized fiction to put her family’s recollections on the record.

We reached out to El Moudir, who sent the following comments via social media. “My connection to animation stems from the fact I always tell my stories through the lens of children’s naivety. That’s why, both in short and feature-length format, my cinematic tools draw inspiration from the world of animation, which is more colorful. I don’t use it in its finished form, but rather a rough, realistic version that connects to my documentary approach.”

Her words sum up the exquisitely hybrid nature of her work, a slice of cinéma du réel that nevertheless employs some fiction, albeit with good intentions (the original Arabic title translates as White Lies), along with a story of real people where the live-action gaps are filled in by crude animation tools. In short, it’s the ideal embodiment of DOK Leipzig’s dual mission statement, as the meeting point of two cinematic modes – not genres – that can intertwine in the most interesting ways.

Made up of a few different crops of a single static image and three very brief audio excerpts from conversations in which the filmmaker asks friends and family to recall living in a particular apartment in Kyiv, it feels as though it should be slight. However, this cleverly shaped 8-minute documentary in fact packs in impressive punch. It is a piece that is all the more effective because while the film’s destination quickly becomes evident, it does not in any way diminish the impact its conclusion has.

Ponomarova and her family moved into their new home on the 15^th floor in February 2002. The filmmaker’s voice refers to it as “this apartment” because the audience can see it – a photograph takes up the whole screen. It shows one face (featuring three windows) of a nondescript tower block, mostly in shadow with another wall catching the glare of the sun. As she discusses their arrival at the flat with her mother, we observe it this moment of stasis, an instant captured in a single frame and a time, now recollected as if in amber. When the audio switches, to a different conversation between Ponomarova and two of her friends, the stories become slightly more informal and sillier. The image on the screen shifts, punching out, to reveal that the original shot was but the crop of a photograph. It immediately feels inevitable that the photograph will be far more contemporary than it initially seemed, that it will betray its origins as during the Russian invasion.

Ponomarova uses the edits between the audio as her cues to zoom ever so slightly further out, while the warmth and intimacy of the conversations travel in the opposite direction. The third conversation she has is with an old boyfriend, they recall the prospect of a teenage liaison on the building’s less-than-dreamy rooftop. Through ephemeral moments the building becomes inhabited, the unremarkable image of a tower block taking on its own romance conferred on it by recounted memories. “It’s good that the building is still intact,” say Ponomarova, like a jolt from the blue. The audio fades and we’re left with the full image – of the Kyiv skyline as smoke rises from a 2022 missile strike. The building may still stand, but with a startling force, Ponomarova’s slender work evokes the minor details of lives that have been forever lost.

Director, producer, editing, screenplay: Mariia Ponomarova
Sound: Sergio González Cuervo
Distributor: ShortsFit (Argentina/Italy)
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Documentary Film)
In Ukrainian, Russian
8 minutes

A World War II survivor with two husbands and three grown-up children behind her, Szmyt began her DJ sideline after she retired from teaching juvenile delinquents for three decades. A cult figure in Warsaw, she plays an eclectic selection of pop, rock and dance music for mostly older audiences at the Hulakula concert hall every week. But she also mans the turntables at clubs and festivals aimed at younger crowds, including queer pride carnivals and late-night techno parties, where she is warmly welcomed with reverential cheers.

Szmyt defiantly dresses, dances and parties like a much younger woman, with an affirmative mantra and tireless energy. Living alone in a modest but cosy apartment, she appears outwardly content, but has a nagging dread of falling sick and losing her independence. This hedonistic golden girl confesses that she prefers the company of younger people because that fools her into feeling young again. She gives inspirational talks to her fellow seniors, assuring them that “those who dance never grow old”. But behind their backs she is quietly disparaging: “I’d rather play for the gays,” she whispers.

Fond of salty language, glittery outfits and fluffy kittens, Szmyt is a highly engaging documentary subject, even if she has her prickly diva side. Following a fall and a hip replacement, she recently enlisted an assistant for her DJ gigs, her “borrowed husband” Krzysztof, a mere baby of 71. He calmly absorbs her tantrums: “You’re passive-aggressive, uptight and fucked up,” she snaps at him before a fraught outdoor performance to a tiny, rain-soaked audience. But his patience is clearly not infinite. In glumly comic asides, he reveals he is planning his exit from thankless sidekick duties.

At times, Zwiefka teasingly hints that Szmyt’s relentlessly upbeat attitude may be a brittle facade. Visiting her childhood hometown, Vilnius in Lithuania, she tearfully recalls hiding from Nazi invaders in a closet, and losing most of her family during the war. This is presumably an oblique reference to the Holocaust, which the film leaves frustratingly vague. Szmyt also seems blithely estranged from her own grown-up children and grandchildren, insisting she is too busy living her best life. “No matter how close the relationship,” she shrugs, “an old person is always a problem, a burden for young people.” For their part, her family disdain her “disco friends” and lack of interest in their lives. There are hidden layers of trauma and tension here that Zwiefka could have probed more deeply.

Maintaining a snappy pace and sparkly visual aesthetic, Zweifka punctuates more conventional observational documentary scenes with a handful of staged song-and-dance numbers that pay fond homage to the golden era of dansingi, or traditional Polish dancehalls. As Szmyt wanders around a dreamlike Warsaw, thronged by dancers young and old, these fantasy-tinged sequences play like commentaries on her inner life, from the wistful nostalgia of Michelle Gurevich’s autumnal ballad “Blue Eyes Unchanged” to the bulletproof optimism of Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive”. In a sweet final flourish, the director dedicates Vika! to “the silver generation, our parents and grandparents, and to our future selves”.

Director, screenwriter: Agnieszka Zwiefka
Cinematography: Monika Kotecka
Editing: Michal Poddebniak, Katarzyna Orzechowska
Music: Paivi Takala
Producers: Katarzyna Slesicka, Anna Stylinska
Production company: My Way Studio (Poland)
World sales: Deckert Distribution, Germany
Venue: DOK Leipzig festival (Audience Competition)
In Polish
74 minutes