QUICK GLANCE

LONG FILMS

1. Joanna
AnetaKopacz, Poland 2013, 45 min, Youth Jury Award 2013
A young woman’s farewell. Limited time, lovingly recorded in suggestive images, reserved and yet fraught with emotional power.

2. The Textures of Loss
Pankaj Butalia, India 2013, 61 min
The surviving dependants of the fathers and sons of Kashmir who were killed in the war. The mosaic of a collective nightmare, the emotional trauma of a region in permanent unrest.

3. Silence Radio
Valéry Rosier, France/Belgium 2012 52 mts, Special Mention Young Cinema Award 2013
The operators of a French community radio and their listeners: senior citizens at the controls and in chintzy interiors, singing. Life is a chanson. Heartbreaking.

4.DNA Dreams
Bregtje van der Haak, Netherlands 2012, 54 min
A biotechnology company in China, the dream of the perfect child and its capitalist exploitation. A multilayered look at a spine-chilling future.

5. No Business Like Show-Business
Martin Schilt, Switzerland 2012, 85 min
A Swiss yodelling choir wins a casting show and the mountain farmers become show business superstars – in the middle of haymaking season! A feel-good film with yodel potential.

6. Land in Sight
Judith Keil/Antje Kruska, Germany 2013, 93 min, Goethe Institut Documentary Prize 2013
Asylum seekers in the East German provinces: red tape, officialise, depression, the search for jobs and women. Cultural misunderstandings with a lot of comic potential.

7. A Diary of a Journey
PiotrStasik, Poland 2013, 54 min
An old man and a boy tour Poland. Passing on the craft of analogue photography. Encounters, reflections on art and a journey of life. Enchanted.

8. The Souls – Tales of Ghostly Encounters
Edwin Beeler, Switzerland 2011, 92 min
Revenants, ghost lights, poltergeists: in the Lucerne Region, the souls of the dead live on mountain tops, in garrets and in the people’s horror tales. Sheer Alpine magic.

9. Virgin Tales Postponed for 2016 edition
Mirjam von Arx, Switzerland/Germany 2012, 87 min
Nice girls in white, crosses, bibles, purity dances and chastity chests: the links between virginity, politics and war in the US. Bizarre and creepy.

10. On the Art of War
Luca Bellino, Silvia Luzi, Italy/USA 2012, 85 min
The long struggle of a group of Italian workers for their factory: occupation, strike, and back-breaking civil war manoeuvres. A complex investigation between hot agitation and cold analysis.

Special Space Film offered by Neelima Mathur

My Death is not Your Death
Lars Barthel, Germany/India 2006, 83 min, Winner Golden Dove German Competition Documentary Film 2006
Poetic, multi-layered dialogue of the film-maker with his late love, who he had met 30 years ago at the film school Babelsberg and later lost in the West.

SHORT FILMS

1. When I Am a Bird
Monika Pwaluczuk, Poland 2013, 28 min
A Kayan woman from Myanmar, her neck squeezed into heavy metal loops, caught in tradition and her fate as a refugee. A tale of sadness, power, and magic.

2. Mama
Lidiya Sheynina, Russia 2013, 28 min, Honorary Mention Short Documentary
The grandmother, 96 and demented Grande dame, becomes a child; the daughter becomes a mama. Filmed by the granddaughter. A gently shimmering small jewel full of tender metaphors and wit.

3. That Elephant from the Bridge
AbhilashVijayan, India 2013, 26 min
The arrival of an Indian travelling circus in impressionistic and sensual images.

4. Emergency Calls
Hannes Vartiainen/PekkaVeikkolainen, Finland 2013, 15 min
Emergency calls: a birth, an accident, the last radio message of the “Estonia”. And images from space. An experimental exploration of the worst case and an ethereal warning.

5. 1989 (When I Was 5 Year Old)
Thor Ochsner, Denmark 2010, 10 min(animated documentary)
An autobiographical and poetic reconstruction of a traumatic childhood experience.

DETAILED SYNOPSES

LONG FILMS

1. Joanna
AnetaKopacz, Poland 2013, 45 min
Youth Jury Award 2013
Jury statement:
By changing from close - What is it worth for fighting, if not for those one loves? A young woman diagnosed with cancer lives in a rural area of Poland, together with her little son and her husband. Joanna is not afraid of death, but of leaving her family behind. Strong emotional pictures let us clearly feel that there has been a particularly strong bond between mother and son. Both love it most to spend their time together. Up to panoramic views and back, the camera provides an understanding of the psychic situation of the people in the film, while respecting their privacy at the same time. The film has deeply moved us, so that we will keep it in our memories for a long time. It teaches us all that one should never give up, however tragic the circumstances are, and always battle on.
Catalogue text:
Joanna’s hand lovingly strokes her son’s back. They are lying in the grass, listening to the meadow dwellers and the sounds of nature. Jas says he has a “divine time” with his mom, and Joanna, too, loves to spend time with her boy. But this time is limited. Joanna says she is not afraid of dying, but of leaving behind her little family. AnetaKopacz’s narrative is remarkably subtle, preserving the tender moments of the remaining days in expressive images. Through its searching vision, which always finds closeness from the distance, its suggestive associations, over which the voices of memory are superimposed and which dissolve time, the film makes the interior state of the young woman visible. What remains are moments of great emotional power and at last a plea: to do everything with love and devotion. Then you could leave something unique to the people you love. Like Joanna did.
Claudia Lehmann

2. The Textures of Loss
Pankaj Butalia, India 2013, 61 min
Catalogue text:
There is a whole generation today who knows nothing but war in Kashmir, which for the past two decades has been a permanent trouble spot between Pakistan and India. In view of the omnipresence of the military, the smallest spark is enough to set off this powder keg. Almost every family has suffered a loss. The bodies of the fathers and sons are brought home. How to deal with the loss; who takes care of the relatives?
The director’s journey to the various provinces resembles a journey into the wounded soul of a region that can find no rest. How do pain, grief, and fear etch themselves into the individual’s psyche? There are no authorities, no therapists, only the gods and the surviving family who move closer together in their corrugated iron shacks. Depression and sleep disorders are common. A boy can’t bear to see the colour red, so he paints green blood. Director Pankaj Butalia composes the mosaic of a collective nightmare from many interviews and sparingly inserted archive footage of fighting in the streets. With his previous film “Manipur Song”, which was also screened at DOK Leipzig, and his next project, “Assamblog”, “The Texture of Loss” forms a trilogy of the bereaved.
Cornelia Klauß

3. Silence Radio
Valéry Rosier, France/Belgium 2012 52 min
Special Mention Young Cinema Award 2013
Jury Statement
A warm-hearted, joyful tribute to a French community radio station, playing old-time chanson and serving their mostly elderly listeners. The film is the seemingly effortless result of a close collaboration between director and subjects.
Catalogue text:
Life is a chanson. Alain Resnais is not the only one who knows this; so do the operators of the “Puisaleine” community radio in rural Picardie. We see for the most part elderly people at the controls, struggling with the computer (occasionally the wrong song will be played), accepting music requests, telling jokes and giggling hysterically into the microphone, or dispensing esoteric to hands-on life counselling (“Leave the house!”). Their listeners sit in interiors that will soon be history, filmed with sociological precision: heart-shaped cushions, pictures of cats, teddy bears, artificial flowers, tassels and baroque curlicues. They sit alone on fully automated beds in rooms that are far too big for them and in which only the photos on the windowsill recall the families that once existed. And they listen to the radio: the song about the white roses, or the one about the love that lasted fifty years. We learn a story with every song, about nights of bombings and burning airplanes, about great love, or the child who died before the parents. And at some point they start to sing. The elegant arrangements and meaningful montage of this tender film, imbued with loss and loneliness, but also with a quiet kind of humour, keep it firmly on the thin line between kitsch and great drama. A film for the heart, whose needs cannot be overestimated.
Grit Lemke

4.DNA Dreams
Bregtje van der Haak, Netherlands 2012, 54 min
Catalogue text:
They are young and highly motivated, have studied abroad and speak fluent English. The employees of the Chinese BGI Ark Biotechnology company study the relation between the human DNA code and IQ. Between their cell-like workplaces and sterile labs, dreaming is still allowed because this is where our future is shaped. Which baby would you like? On the backdrop of China’s one-child policy it’s only natural that it should be perfect. So one day we will be able to assemble our ideal child by character, intelligence and looks, like in a department store. Of course, genes that guarantee a long life are particularly valued.
This company, which accepts only the blood samples of the very best, sees itself as a saviour of humanity in the vein of Noah’s Ark. Director Bregtje van der Haak was given generous access to the company premises where the young scientists talk freely about their visions. You can literally sense their excitement at “playing God”. But what if the results of their research are translated into a Western business model? As the director includes apparently peripheral details into her visual world, she manages to open a space for reflection that brings home the contemporaneity and monstrosity of these horror scenarios.
Cornelia Klauß

5. No Business Like Show-Business
Martin Schilt, Switzerland 2012, 85 min
Catalogue text:
They are young and highly motivated, have studied abroad and speak fluent English. The employees of the Chinese BGI This film does away with the stereotype that yodelling belongs in the somewhat dowdy corner of folksy music shows in dirndls and lederhosen. For two years, the filmmaker followed the Wiesenberger Yodellers on their way to show business. They are a club of 20 yodelling Swiss mountain farmers who used to meet in the chapel once a week to yodel together – until they won the “The Greatest Swiss Hits” talent show. Now the amateur yodellers are recording artists swamped with offers. Some of the farmers have reached their limit; others are intoxicated by the new world opening up to them. Then they get the offer to represent Switzerland at the Shanghai Expo – during haymaking season of all times. This is where their success becomes the acid test for the yodelling club, where traditionally all decisions are democratically discussed and reached by consensus.
This film shows how different ideas of solidarity and friendship work, documenting how the yodellers manage to stay authentic despite the limelight. And it casually dusts off the image of musicians who make folk music in the best sense of the word. You’ll leave the cinema yodelling!
Antje Stamer

6. Land in Sight
Judith Keil/Antje Kruska, Germany 2013, 93 min
Goethe Institut Documentary Prize 2013
Jury Statement:
The Jury of the Goethe Institute is pleased to award this year’s Goethe Documentary Film Prize to Judith Keil and Antje Kruska for their inspiring and sensitive documentary film „Land in Sicht“.
In the current discussions about migration to Europe, this film shows, in an empathic way, the every-day problems, with which refugees are confronted in Germany. The film succeeds, with its subtle humour, by taking a closer look and always being at eye level with the protagonists, in presenting a multi-faceted panorama of natives and migrants living together in a small German town. With their persistence and a great deal of empathy, the female directors push their way through right to the core of German bureaucracy, thus breaking well-established clichés that are prevail in the Brandenburg province.
Catalogue text:
Paradise does have its downsides. Unlike the biblical Christians who want to enlighten him, Brian, an asylum seeker from Cameroon, has hopes for this life – and that’s clearly situated in Germany. Unfortunately he has ended up in Bad Belzig in Brandenburg, where there’s little excitement except for an amateur belly dance group and a marching band. He has no “useful” country of origin to show for – right now there’s no war in Cameroon, only a lack of opportunity. The Yemenite soldier Abdul, who would rather carry arms in civilian life and work in security, is in a similar situation. Farid from Iran for his part can’t go back for political reasons and can’t bring his family over without residence status.
Three open-ended fates which the two directors accompany with their usual thoroughness over the course of a year in their fourth film together as they attempt to understand the wordings of the employment agency and the red tape jungle, and to find a German wife, if need be. Preferably one who doesn’t just guarantee a right of residence but also knows how to cook. Bad Belzig turns out to be a stroke of luck for the film, since the East German province shows a lot of comic potential in its touching attempts to help the foreigners. The intercultural misunderstandings in particular highlight our German “paradise”, which is founded solely on paper.
Cornelia Klauß

7. A Diary of a Journey
Piotr Stasik, Poland 2013, 54 min
Catalogue text:
Tadeusz has devoted his life to photography, especially photo reportages. Now he has grown old and passes on his art to Michal, a highly motivated 15-year-old. They go on a trip together, travelling through Polish villages in their van with the built-in dark chamber, portraying the people they meet. Their black-and-white photos add up to a visual travel diary. Piotr Stasik has found his own poetic way of capturing the work of Tadeusz Rolke, who used to work for “Spiegel” and “Stern”: as a documentary road movie that also seems to be a trip through time. From the start this enterprise radiates an old-fashioned quality. And this is not just about the good old analogue image. When the developed photos are strung across the empty market square on a clothesline, they enable simple encounters that could never happen on Facebook. But it’s the encounter between old and young that’s at the centre here. The master and his pupil form an unconventional team whose roles are occasionally reversed. What Tadeusz missed in life, Michal still has a chance to catch up on. And so this film ultimately tells the story of a journey through life. No lack of big issues here, but the light touch with which they are compiled really makes the difference. While the magic of a summer is superimposed over everything.
Lars Meyer

8. The Souls – Tales of Ghostly Encounters
Edwin Beeler, Switzerland 2011, 92 min
Catalogue text:
They come as dark shapes or ghost lights. Sometimes one only hears their steps, feels their presence or the touch of an icy hand, perhaps a breeze. They are the souls of the dead who find no release and haunt the mountains, wooden farms, barns, garrets and bedrooms as well as the folk tales of the inhabitants of the Lucerne region.To collect these horror tales in a kind of ethnographic oral history project to preserve a vanishing pre-Christian magic way of thinking (even though it was largely incorporated in a kind of folk Catholicism) and defend it against the “dis-enchanted world” in Weber’s sense is one thing. But Edwin Beeler’s careful, never merely illustrative montage of cloudy summits and apparently unreal alpine panoramas or mountain dwellers going about their daily chores, combined with sounds and a music that incorporates alpine elements without getting too folksy, achieves a lot more. It is something that Western people desperately search in all kinds of esoteric frippery: a spirituality that is part of a holistic approach to life and death, rooted deep in the landscape, its language and people. Something that cannot be bought.
Grit Lemke

9. Virgin Tales Postponed for 2016 edition
Mirjam von Arx, Switzerland/Germany 2012, 87 min
Catalogue text:
Girls in white dancing around a cross, before they tearfully receive “purity rings” and “chastity chests” from their fathers; who lecture about “waiting in purity” and how to modestly cover one’s neckline while serving tea at “purity meetings”. Boys in armour and sword who are knighted as future leaders of the country and the family. White roses and bibles everywhere. It may look like a carnival and mummery, but for 25 percent of the US population this is serious, even sacred.
Mirjam von Arx observed a family of seven in Colorado Springs, the centre of evangelical Christians in the United States, over a period of one and a half years. The Wilsons are the movement’s poster-family, its most zealous defenders, who founded the tradition of the “purity balls” that is now spreading across the globe. A model American family, smart, neat and far from unlikeable. It is one of the achievements of this film that its protagonists are not exhibited as freaks but that the phenomenon is explored in all its complexity, with all political and ideological implications. Because the virgin’s counterpart is the soldier, the GI. He’s fighting in Afghanistan – in agreement with his chaste wife at home – for the “true” values of God and country: against pre-marital sex, people of different colours and faiths, gays, democrats, etc. The private has rarely been so political.
Grit Lemke

10. On the Art of War
Luca Bellino, Silvia Luzi, Italy/USA 2012, 85 min
One-Liner:
The long struggle of a group of Italian workers for their factory: occupation, strike, and back-breaking civil war manoeuvres. A complex investigation between hot agitation and cold analysis.
Catalogue text:
On 31 May 2008, a quiet and sunny Sunday, the staff of a heavy metal assembly plant in Milan-Lambrate met for a picnic. They had hardly unwrapped their sandwiches when a short message from the then current owner, who had bought the plant only in 2006, reached them: “We have decided to cease all activity as of 31 May 2008.”
Luca Bellino’s and Silvia Luzi’s film sheds light on the 50 workers’ long struggle, which started with the occupation of the facility on the same day, led to continued production under a worker’s management and, after the factory was cleared by the police for the first time, resulted in an open-ended strike in front of the factory gates to prevent the secret removal of the machinery. Finally, on 2 August 2009, a large number of police attacked the strikers in a civil war-like operation, upon which five of them seized an industrial crane on the grounds and occupied it for several weeks. The activists’ determination triggered a broad wave of international support and attracted a lot of media attention, which finally contributed to a long-term resolution of this conflict. Bellino and Luzi manage to create a complex cinematic investigation of an intense, real-life example of anarcho-syndicalist theory and practice in Italy, supremely balanced between hot agitation and cold analysis.
Ralph Eue

Special Space Film offered by Neelima Mathur

My Death is not Your Death
Lars Barthel, Germany/India 2006, 83 min
Winner Golden Dove German Competition Documentary Film 2006
One-liner:
Poetic, multi-layered dialogue of the film-maker with his late love, who he had met 30 years ago at the film school Babelsberg and later lost in the West.
Catalogue text:
In the mid 1970’s Lars Barthel was a camera student at the film school in Babelsberg. Together with other students he tried to fathom the boundaries of the school and find loopholes for their projects. Often difficulties started with obtaining a shooting permit. Other times they faced restrictions while editing. In defiance of this daily skirmish, the students weren’t dissuaded from enjoying the sensual pleasures of life. They partied, had love-stories and sometimes even gained a Pyrrhic victory. Suddenly an unfamiliar “creature” entered the atmosphere, as if from a different planet. ChetnaVora came to the GDR at the age of 16 to study directing. She is the daughter of a communist functionary and came to this “better world” to get to know the country, its people and their ideas. Lars Barthel and ChetnaVora fall in love and have a child together. But the “period of grace” at the school comes to an end. They still share the same reality, but their dreams start to head in different directions. Lars Barthel wants to got to India, while Chetna prefers West-Berlin. In 1982 the exit visa was authorized and an odyssey commences full of disappointments and divisiveness. Lars Barthel never really managed to deflect – let alone understand – the tragic loss of Chetna. In his first film as director he embarks on a journey into the past – the result is a poetic documentary, that doesn’t evade any of the painful truths.
Cornelia Klauß

SHORT FILMS

1. When I Am a Bird
Monika Pwaluczuk, Poland 2013, 28 min
Catalogue text:
She would like to return as a little bird in the next life, small enough to hide. Right now she still lives in a bird cage, at the mercy of the whims of a fate that transported her and her family from Myanmar to a refugee village in the Thai jungle. The rain drums ceaselessly on the roof. The torrential river in front of the house is as powerful as the suppressed feelings of a woman who gave birth to 12 children and lost some of them. She hasn’t chosen her husband; moreover, he sometimes flies away. Now she only hopes that her daughter will follow. Bad connections often thwart attempts to contact her by phone or receive messages via the wireless. From the outside the members of the Kayan tribe, especially the women with their heavy necklaces, look like rare specimens of a dying species you can admire in tourist show villages. But the film reveals a world no tourist ever sees. In a clear visual language that is both atmospheric and symbolic it carefully approaches the interior reality of the protagonist, withholding any prerogative interpretation. Who can look into a person’s soul, after all? And yet the strength, courage – and magic – that it takes to live this life emerge clearly.
Lars Meyer

2. Mama
Lidiya Sheynina, Russia 2013, 28 min
Honorary Mention Short Documentary
Jury Statement:
An intimate depiction of the filmmaker's family, this short is marked by subtle observations of everyday life.
Catalogue text:
LidiyaSheynina points her calm and distant camera at her mother’s body and face, often angled from below. Over the years, the mother has evolved the physiognomy of a turtle plodding along comfortably. Life is hard, the flat is cramped, but she makes the best of it – on and on. She has taken care of her aged mother for decades, the grey-haired, graceful Grande dame of this student film treasure, who sometimes exercises (jumping jack in a wheelchair), sometimes calls old friends (if they haven’t died yet), sometimes does the dishes (even the Teflon frying pans she’s not supposed to) but usually only sits and eats, or drinks from a beautiful old cup that has “babushka” written on it. The grandmother, who has forgotten how old she is (“What? 96? Impossible.”), that she has had no husband for the past 17 years (“Really?”) and hasn’t left the flat in 20 years (“That’s precisely why I’d like to go out again.”), has turned into a child, the daughter into a mama. The radio talks of the wonderful independence of old age; life is different. Together every day and every night. And yet Mama happily sways back and forth to the morning music and looks out of the window with her mother. Waiting for spring. Such tender metaphors turn “Mama”, a film of small gestures, into great cinema.
Barbara Wurm

3. That Elephant from the Bridge
Lidiya Sheynina, Russia 2013, 28 min
Catalogue text:
A metal rod stuck in the ground is treated with an oversized hammer. An old man washes his feet. A short-statured artist stabilises his rusty bedstead with a few stones. Over here someone takes a curious look out of the window, over there a little discussion whether the man with the muscles is wearing his shirt inside out or not is going on. Posts are erected, ropes tightened. And at last the big tent rises from the ground. The people turn into clowns and artists.
This film portrays the arrival of an Indian travelling circus in a new town in impressionistic and sensual images. The focus is not on the magic of the performance, though, but on the things that go on around it, the handiwork, the community of very different personalities living under the same roof. This doesn’t destroy the aura of the circus. On the contrary, its mystery is preserved in the fragments. And the collage erects a big top of moods.
Lars Meyer

4. Emergency Calls
Hannes Vartiainen/PekkaVeikkolainen, Finland 2013, 15 min
Catalogue text:
What is your emergency? The question that’s at the start of every call to an emergency centre is also at the start of this film. Excited, sometimes desperate people on the soundtrack. The emergencies: precipitate labour, a multiple car crash. But also a killing spree and the last radio message of the “Estonia”. The call marks the boundary between life and death which – perhaps – will be crossed. It also depends on those who take it: embodied here by white figures lacking any status-generating symbols such as clothing or hair. Reduced to the naked, pure human being everything depends on. Or are they the Erinyes who hold our fate in their hands?
There is no blood, no images of disasters. We see NASA footage of earth as seen from space instead, clouds, lightshows, radar signals, pointedly distorted. What is one man’s need in view of the infinity of the universe? – Everything, claims this film which, like all works by the directing duo Vartiainen/Veikkolainen, defies categorisation. It reminds us of the conjunctive which runs through our secure lives in the shape of the potential for the worst case. The writing on the wall that silently hovers above us. Would have. Could have. What is your emergency?
Grit Lemke

5. 1989 (When I Was 5 Year Old)
Thor Ochsner, Denmark 2010, 10 min
(animated documentary)
Catalogue text:
An October evening in 1989. A five-year-old boy on his way to the airport to pick up his mother. His father is driving, it’s raining and the windscreen wipers are moving steadily, when disaster strikes ... An autobiographical and poetic reconstruction of a traumatic childhood experience.