69th DOK Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animated Film 2026

DOK Leipzig 2026

Written by Narges Samadi

A railway station is not usually a place to stay. You do not even need to arrive half an hour early to catch a train! People go there to get from one place to another, carrying suitcases that sometimes seem heavier than themselves, heading toward meetings that may never happen, and following timetables that leave little room to reflect on the past.

Yet on the opening night of the 69th DOK Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, the East Hall of Leipzig Central Station took on an entirely different purpose for a few hours. Some 1,300 people had gathered not to depart, but to sit down and watch the lives of others unfold: women who had spoken about themselves nearly half a century earlier and who, now in old age, were returning once again to their past.

Perhaps the decision to use a railway station as a venue for festival screenings offered, even before it served as a practical choice of location, an image of documentary cinema’s relationship with time. Trains leave, passengers change, buildings remain, and every generation imagines that the version of the past it possesses is somehow closer to the truth.

But the past never returns exactly as it happened, even when a camera recorded it.

Leipzig is a fitting city in which to contemplate this distance, a city whose history cannot be read simply through its old buildings.

Just a few streets away from the station, St. Nicholas Church still recalls the gatherings that developed into mass protests against the East German government in the autumn of 1989. At St. Thomas Church lies Johann Sebastian Bach, a composer whose life ended centuries ago, yet whose music continues to resonate through the city where he spent part of his life.

Here, history does not belong entirely to the past. Something of it remains in the present: sometimes in a historical building, sometimes in the memories of a generation that remembers divided Germany, and sometimes in archival images that take on new meanings each time they are shown.

DOK Leipzig has a comparable history. Founded in East Germany in 1955, it gradually became a place where cinema, politics, and ideology intersected during the Cold War. Since 1962, Picasso’s Dove of Peace has been part of the festival’s visual identity: a bird whose image travelled from Paris to Leipzig at a time when movement across the Berlin Wall was severely restricted.

This contradiction also reveals something about documentary cinema. An image can serve a political system while simultaneously becoming a means of challenging that same system. The fact that a camera records reality does not necessarily make it independent of ideology. The choice of perspective, characters, sequence of images, sound, and even what remains outside the frame all contribute to a film's political and historical meaning.

The festival’s 69th edition, the first under the direction of Ola Staszel, presented 217 films and extended-reality works from 61 countries. More than 57,000 visitors and over 2,100 accredited guests attended its programmes, setting a new attendance record.

Yet numbers alone can never explain the quality of a cinematic experience. Nor is the history of a festival shaped solely by its award-winning films and prizes. Sometimes it is worth looking at films screened in different sections, with no apparent connection to one another: works that, by the end of the week, begin a conversation in a viewer’s memory, one that may never have been anticipated in the festival’s official programme.

At Leipzig this year, such a conversation could be traced among the stories of East German women, a small garden in Schwerin, a family on the outskirts of Amman, a woman’s return to her birthplace in Israel, an Iranian activist living in Athens, workers in New York, and a hundred-year-old composer in Budapest.

These films cannot be brought together based on their subjects alone. What makes their comparison meaningful is their different approaches to filmmaking: how each film moves toward reality, what position it assigns to the camera, and how much it lets viewers think independently about what they see, beyond the characters’ words or the filmmaker’s own position.

The central question, then, is no longer simply what a documentary shows.

The more important question is how a film transforms what it shows into knowledge about the world.

A Past That Is Retold Each Time

Good Evening, You Beautiful (Guten Abend, du Schöne), directed by Ina Borrmann, was the festival’s opening film. It returns to Good Morning, You Beautiful, the book by Maxi Wander.

In 1977, Wander published a collection of East German women’s personal accounts that became one of the influential works of the country’s social literature. The women spoke about their lives: work, love, marriage, motherhood, loneliness, unfulfilled desires, and dreams they might not even have been able to express openly.

The book’s significance lay not merely in recording these conversations, but in creating space for individual experience within a society where official representations of women were often tied to prescribed social roles.

Several decades later, Borrmann’s film revisits those experiences, this time in circumstances where not only have the women grown old, but the country in which their lives took shape no longer exists.

We are confronted with three distinct layers of narration: the women’s lived experiences, the literary text constructed from their words, and the cinematic reinterpretation of those experiences in the present.

This structure raises a fundamental question about memory and representation. An original interview does not contain a person’s entire life. Transforming it into a book is itself a process of selection and organization. The film then creates another narrative through its choices of faces, archival material, and sound.

What the viewer encounters, therefore, is not an unmediated return to the past, but a past represented several times through different media.

In the film, portraits of the older women, photographed by Susanne Schüle, are combined with historical amateur footage. At times, these images evoke the collective and ideological order of the past; at others, they reveal aspects of private and everyday life.

In such a combination, the archive does more than explain history. It can stand in tension with individual memory, as though the official image of history and a woman’s recollection of her own life were two accounts that do not always coincide.

Yet the film does not fully explore this contrast throughout.

In certain passages, the historical significance of the women’s testimonies takes precedence over the film’s cinematic construction. Rather than creating a new tension between images of the past, faces in the present, and personal recollections, the film relies heavily on the emotional and historical value of what the women have to say.

This does not diminish the importance of the subject, but it does illuminate the difference between recording testimony and creating a cinematic experience.

In a documentary built around memory and speech, the critical question should not be limited to what the characters say. We must also ask what the filmmaker does with their words: how they use silence, how they place archival images in relation to recollections, and how much room they give the viewer to examine the distance between historical experience and its present-day narration.

Opening the festival with this film, alongside the attention given to East German experiences in the Fokus Ost programme, suggested a cultural direction under the festival’s new leadership. Yet revisiting this past becomes more cinematically valuable when it moves beyond recounting memories to question how those memories are formed and how their authority is established.

This question takes a different form in the work of Helena Třeštíková, the Czech documentary filmmaker whose tribute programme was one of the festival’s significant events.

In Třeštíková’s cinema, the camera does not simply return to the past; it is present as that past takes shape.

In The Miracle (1975), a short film, the camera approaches a woman on the threshold of motherhood. This experience later finds an extended form in the long-term project Private Universe, which follows the life of a family over thirty-seven years.

The significance of this method lies not simply in its length. When the filmmaker begins the project, she cannot know what will happen to the people she is filming. Life does not follow a narrative plan established in advance.

During editing, however, the filmmaker looks back on a past whose subsequent developments she now partly knows.

This distance between filming and editing is a defining characteristic of longitudinal documentary cinema.

An image of a person in youth, when placed beside an image of the same person in old age, acquires a meaning that did not exist at the moment of the original filming. By selecting a limited number of moments from years of lived experience, editing establishes new relationships between past and present.

In Třeštíková’s films, therefore, time is not merely the subject of the work; it is one of the elements that shape its narrative structure.

This approach also raises complex ethical questions. The presence of a camera in someone’s life over several decades creates a personal relationship between filmmaker and subject. But that relationship cannot remain the same over the years.

Does someone who agreed to have their private life recorded in youth necessarily feel the same way about the release of those images decades later? Does long-term intimacy with a subject allow a filmmaker to develop a deeper understanding, or might it also compromise the independence of their perspective?

In longitudinal documentary, the question is not only what the camera has witnessed. It is also what the filmmaker has come to know about the subject over time, and what knowledge they choose to make available to the audience through editing.

If the passage of time becomes visible in Třeštíková’s cinema through changing faces and human relationships, time assumes a different form in Kurtág Fragments, directed by Dénes Nagy.

The Hungarian composer György Kurtág turned one hundred in February 2026. Alongside tracing his life, the film explores his relationships with musicians and the ongoing process of musical creation.

Among these collaborations, the presence of Víkingur Ólafsson and Steven Isserlis is particularly important. These musicians do not merely perform the written score; through rehearsals and conversations with the composer, they arrive at renewed interpretations.

This brings Nagy’s documentary into direct contact with a question that extends beyond an artist's biography.

In Kurtág’s music, silence, pauses, brief compositions, and meticulous attention to detail occupy a central place. The distance between the written note and its performance creates room for interpretation and discovery.

For cinema, confronting such a subject presents a specific challenge: how can the process of thinking through sound become an audiovisual experience without reducing the image to mere accompaniment or explanation?

In a documentary about a composer, images of faces, hands, and instruments are not enough to communicate the experience of artistic creation. Their significance emerges when the viewer can follow the relationship between listening, decision-making, correction, and repeated performance.

If, in Třeštíková’s cinema, a gap of several decades between two images can create new meaning, a comparable distance may arise in the encounter with Kurtág’s music between two performances of a single short phrase.

Time acquires another scale.

The screening of the film in Leipzig, a city so closely associated with Bach’s musical legacy, also carried cultural significance. Yet the cinematic value of a documentary about an artist should not be sought solely in the stature of its subject.

The more important question is whether the film can transform the process of artistic creation into an independent subject of observation and understanding.

At the same festival, another film about an artist born in 1926 approached this question from a very different direction.

The Masturbator – The Adventures of Edgar Hilsenrath, directed by François-Xavier Destors, explores the life and literary world of Edgar Hilsenrath, the German-Jewish writer born in Leipzig whose experiences of Nazi persecution and ghetto life profoundly influenced his work.

Hilsenrath was a writer for whom conventional ways of narrating historical catastrophe were insufficient.

Through black humour, exaggeration, and grotesque situations, he confronted readers with laughter, discomfort, and moral uncertainty at once.

Destors’ film similarly approaches the writer’s literary universe through a combination of historical footage, fictional elements, and animation.

Here, animation is not simply a substitute for missing archival images. It makes it possible to enter a world created through the imaginative reconstruction and transformation of historical experience.

Yet the encounter between recorded images and constructed ones, particularly in relation to the Holocaust, raises an important question about the credibility of representation.

Must a historical catastrophe necessarily be narrated through the language of mourning? Or can humour expose dimensions of violence and absurdity that the official language of commemoration is unable to express?

Black humour can create critical distance. But if its relationship with historical experience is not kept clear, that same distance risks becoming indifference or spectacle.

Here, the film’s formal choices cannot be separated from its subject. The use of animation, archival material, and fictional narration determines how the work moves between historical documentation and literary imagination.

Comparing the films about Kurtág and Hilsenrath reveals, beyond the coincidence of the two artists’ centenaries, two very different possibilities for documentary cinema:

approaching musical creation through sound and performance, and revisiting historical experience through language, imagination, and humour.

From this point, the discussion leads to one of the defining features of DOK Leipzig’s identity: the presence of animation alongside documentary cinema.

Animation: A Truth That Was Not Necessarily Recorded

The coexistence of documentary and animation at DOK Leipzig has theoretical significance that extends far beyond the division of its programme into categories. Their presence together challenges the boundary between an image that has been recorded and an image that has been created.

In the conventional understanding, documentary cinema deals with a world that exists independently of the camera, while animation creates images that did not previously exist in that form.

But this distinction is no longer sufficient to explain many works of contemporary cinema.

A substantial part of human experience, particularly memories of repression, undocumented events, and the inner worlds of individuals, has no direct visual record. Animation can propose a visual form for such experiences without necessarily claiming that the resulting image is an objective document of reality.

The Orbit of Minor Satellites, directed by Chris Sullivan and winner of the Golden Dove for Feature-Length Animated Film, offered an important example through which to consider this question.

This black-and-white film combines animation and live-action imagery to explore the relationship between a psychiatrist and his patient, moving along the boundary between therapy sessions and the characters’ inner worlds.

Rosemary, the psychiatrist’s patient, sometimes imagines that she lives in a Cold War-era space station. Through rotoscoping and shifts between live-action footage and animation, the film destabilizes the boundary between the external world and subjective experience.

This choice is cinematically significant because a camera can record a person’s behaviour but has no direct access to their inner experience.

Animation can give that experience a visual form. Nevertheless, a distinction must be maintained between visualizing a subjective experience and claiming to represent it in its entirety.

In The Orbit of Minor Satellites, the relationship between psychiatrist and patient also becomes a question of power and dependency. Someone positioned as an observer and diagnostician may themselves be involved in a complicated relationship with the person they are observing.

Here, the film’s form is inseparable from its subject. The movement between reality and imagination offers a way to examine the unstable boundary between observer and observed.

In Spray and Pray, directed by Ventsa Androva, animation serves a different purpose. The film examines the mechanisms through which misinformation is produced and circulated in digital environments, using synthetic visual elements to investigate a world in which the credibility of images and sounds has itself become uncertain.

When the subject is the fabrication of information and the production of apparently credible content, the use of constructed images can become part of the film’s cinematic argument.

Yet this possibility also carries the danger of simplification. An image that makes a complex system easier to understand may, by removing its contradictions, create an apparently clear picture of an incomplete reality.

Animation, therefore, like observational or archival documentary, is not exempt from responsibility to evidence and how that evidence is interpreted.

In Letters from the Silenced Country, directed by Andrei Kutsila and winner of the Golden Dove for Feature-Length Documentary Film, the relationship between constructed images and historical reality becomes particularly direct.

The film addresses political repression in Belarus, combining testimony, documentary footage, and animation to approach the lives of people whose experiences could not always be recorded directly.

The distinction between an archival image and an image created from memory or drawing is essential. One may function as evidence of a particular event, while the other brings us closer to personal experience and the process of reconstructing it.

If a film preserves this distinction, it can place different forms of historical knowledge alongside one another rather than substituting imagination for evidence.

At the other end of the spectrum, Terminal, directed by Alexandre Siqueira and winner of the Golden Dove for Short Animated Film, reminds us that animation should not be defined solely in relation to documentary cinema.

In works that use imagery, colour, and movement to express emotional experience, the constructed image is not necessarily intended to fill the absence of historical documentation. Its value lies in the independence of its visual language and the narrative possibilities that language offers.

This is particularly important for a festival where animation has historically been part of its identity, rather than merely a technique used to supplement documentary filmmaking.

In his theories of documentary cinema, Bill Nichols demonstrates how historical reality is presented to the viewer through processes of selection and organization. Stella Bruzzi, meanwhile, emphasizes the role of performance and the camera’s presence in shaping the film's reality.

From this perspective, the documentary image is never a completely neutral reflection of the world.

But this does not mean that all images possess the same evidentiary value.

Historical documentation, reconstruction, memory, and imagination serve different purposes, and the filmmaker has a responsibility to keep the relationships between them clear.

The presence of animation throughout Leipzig’s programme, from the international competition to Animation Night and the extended-reality works in DOK Neuland, broadened this discussion.

Yet new technology alone does not create a new artistic experience. Sometimes a simple image of a face or a conversation can reveal a world more complex than a work made with extensive visual resources.

The more significant criterion is the relationship between the method of creating the image, the question the film raises, and the encounter it establishes with its audience.

This question extends from historical films and animation to the festival’s social documentaries, where land, home, ownership, and belonging become central to the narrative.

Land, Roots, and the Right to Remain

In Garden of Hope, directed by Dieter Schumann, the camera travels to a residential neighbourhood in Schwerin, where a plot of land among prefabricated apartment buildings left from the East German era has been transformed into a communal garden.

Migrants, refugees, older adults, and individuals who have experienced poverty, loneliness, and loss come together in this garden. Among them are Omar from Syria, Kateryna from Ukraine, Abdul from Afghanistan, and Manfred, an older man who has lost his wife.

These people do not share the same past, the same language, or necessarily even the same understanding of what home means.

Yet the garden creates a space in which relationships are experienced through shared activity before they need to be expressed through theoretical conversations about coexistence.

To grow a plant, the soil must be prepared, water brought, decisions made about when to sow, and time allowed for the results to emerge. Unlike many social relationships, this work does not depend on nationality or fluency in a shared language.

This quality makes the garden a cinematic space.

Schumann follows this community's life over eighteen months. Within such a structure, the repetition of everyday activities and the changing seasons allow relationships to be observed as they gradually develop.

Time does not merely let plants grow; it also lets human connections take shape.

In the film’s most successful moments, observation replaces direct explanation. The characters do not need to speak constantly about migration, loss, or loneliness. How they work together, divide responsibilities, and even navigate small disagreements can reveal aspects of these experiences.

Nevertheless, the film faces a danger common to many social documentaries: turning a limited, hopeful experience into a general conclusion about society.

A garden cannot replace immigration policy, economic security, or social justice. Nor does working together mean that all cultural and historical differences have disappeared.

The film’s value lies not in proving that coexistence is possible, but in observing the conditions under which such a possibility, however limited and fragile, can emerge.

For a migrant who has lost a home and some of the connections that once defined their life, even a small patch of soil may mean something far beyond a place to grow plants.

Here, through care and the continuity of daily work, land becomes an experience of belonging.

Yet that same soil acquires a very different meaning in Concrete Land, directed by Asmahan Bkerat.

The film follows an Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family living on Amman's outskirts. Grandparents, children, and grandchildren live in tents on the edge of the city, where expanding construction and shifting land ownership threaten the continuity of their lives.

The film begins with the family’s everyday routines: tending sheep, preparing their living space, and children moving through the area. Flowers, olive trees, and the surrounding land form an environment deeply connected to the family’s way of life.

Gradually, however, external forces enter this fragile order.

Racial discrimination against the children, the grandmother’s memories of Palestinian displacement, and eventually the threat of demolition and forced relocation connect the apparent calm of everyday life to history and politics.

Structurally, this approach matters because the film does not begin immediately with the crisis. It first establishes the characters’ relationship with their environment and the routines of their lives. Hence, the threat of losing that environment means more to the viewer than a news report about eviction.

This relationship with place makes the difference between Garden of Hope and Concrete Land clear.

In the first film, a small piece of land gives people from different places an opportunity to put down roots. In the second, land that has long been intertwined with a family’s life may be taken away from them.

One concerns the possibility of creating a new home; the other, the threat of losing an old one.

Yet in both films, home extends beyond a property deed or a geographical address.

Home takes shape through repeated activities, through things people care for, through memories connected to a particular place, and through the sense of familiarity that develops with an environment.

This question becomes more complex in Fracture, directed by Keren Kreiser.

At twenty, Kreiser left Israel to study dance in Belgium. Her departure stemmed not only from her desire to continue her life and artistic work, but also from a wish to distance herself from the political conflicts of her birthplace.

Her return in 2023, after eight years in Europe, becomes a search to understand her relationship with a land to which she belongs, yet whose political and social structures she partly conflicts with.

The film takes the form of a visual diary. Images of everyday life, family conversations, intimate relationships, and participation in political protests are juxtaposed.

Its first-person structure is essential. Kreiser is not simply the subject of the documentary; she is also its filmmaker, turning the camera into part of the process through which she attempts to understand her own position.

In such a structure, the conventional distance between the observer and the observed disappears.

But proximity does not necessarily make reality more transparent. Instead, the filmmaker finds herself in a position where personal perspective, family experience, and political convictions continually collide.

Kreiser’s conversation with her mother about politics, Gaza, and the possibility of peace is a significant expression of this conflict. Even the closest family relationship does not necessarily imply a shared historical memory or political judgement.

Returning to one’s birthplace can bring feelings of familiarity and estrangement at the same time.

This contradiction is also present in the film’s structure. The visual diary begins with private and ordinary moments, but the political events of 2023 gradually transform the meaning of those images.

Unlike a filmmaker reconstructing a historical event after it has ended, Kreiser has a camera present during some of the developments themselves, without knowing from the outset what those images will later come to mean.

This quality brings Fracture close to longitudinal documentary cinema in its relationship between time and editing, but with one important difference: the filmmaker herself is at the centre of the political and personal crisis.

Yet amid these conflicts, an apparently simple image becomes significant: the flowers and plants that her mother carefully tends.

Her gardening recalls knitting. Just as stitches are joined one after another to create a fabric, the growth of a plant results from repetition, patience, and attention to detail.

This comparison is not merely poetic. In the structure of lived experience, both activities require continuity, and neither produces its result in a single moment.

In a film where political disagreements and historical anxiety continually affect human relationships, caring for plants reveals another way of relating to time.

Gardening does not allow complete control over nature, but it creates responsibility and a continuing connection with the environment.

An important question emerges: does belonging to a land necessarily originate in nationality, borders, and historical narratives, or can it also form through a personal relationship with soil and plants?

In Fracture, returning to one’s birthplace does not necessarily mean recovering the feeling of being at home. Kreiser confronts a land in which her personal and family history was formed, yet her ethical and political position prevents her from accepting that belonging without question.

The plants her mother cultivates, by contrast, create a relationship with place through daily care, one that does not necessarily depend on political agreement.

This observation brings Fracture close to Garden of Hope.

In both films, gardening connects identity and belonging to a repetitive, tangible activity. Yet the characters' circumstances are profoundly different.

In Garden of Hope, migrants attempt to create new connections in an unfamiliar place. In Fracture, the central character returns to her birthplace but confronts a distance between personal memory and political reality. In Concrete Land, meanwhile, the family’s life is bound to land whose possible loss threatens the continuity of that very existence.

Together, these three films suggest that land can be a possibility for beginning again, a site of threatened displacement, or a place where individuals encounter the fractures within their own identities.

Even the cutting of trees for Christmas, which in many societies has become a symbol of warmth, celebration, and family togetherness, reveals another dimension of this relationship.

A tree whose growth has been brought to an end becomes, for a time, the centre of a family ritual. Elsewhere, a plant's survival and growth may represent the beginning of security and belonging for someone who has been displaced.

This contrast is not intended to equate different cultural experiences or to pass simplistic judgement on them. Rather, it reveals how human beings create meaning, memory, and identity through different relationships with nature.

The importance of these images lies in their ability to bring concepts such as homeland, migration, and identity out of political vocabulary and into observable experience.

Here, soil and plants are no longer merely natural elements or image backgrounds. Human relationships with them reveal something about people’s historical and social circumstances.

But if these films are primarily concerned with finding or preserving a place to live, Free Zone, directed by Jasmine Alakari, shifts the question toward the possibility of being free within that place.

Abtin Parsa, an Iranian political activist, lives in Exarchia, a neighbourhood in Athens long associated with protest movements and struggles over the control of urban space.

Abtin has left Iran, but his experience of repression and the uncertainties of life in exile continue to shape his behaviour and decisions.

In the film, political struggle cannot be separated from personal relationships. Intimacy, legal insecurity, anger, and the desire for freedom are all present in the character’s life.

This situation raises an important question about the camera's responsibility.

A filmmaker who enters an activist's life may record experiences that remain invisible in official reports. Yet this same proximity can reduce critical distance.

Empathy with a subject does not mean endorsing every action or decision that person makes.

From this perspective, the importance of Free Zone lies not merely in introducing an Iranian political activist, but in revealing the contradictions between the ideal of freedom and the limitations that continue to shape his personal and social life.

When street confrontations turn violent, the filmmaker’s position becomes an even more pressing question: to what extent can a camera remain simply a witness, and at what point does its presence become part of the situation itself?

Here, the meaning of home becomes connected to the question of freedom.

Having somewhere to live does not necessarily mean having a home if that place lacks security, independence, and the ability to make decisions about one’s future.

The same question extends from the streets of Athens to workplaces in New York, where Barbara Kopple’s Union Town explores workers’ struggles to organize collectively and defend their rights.

With films such as Harlan County, USA and American Dream behind her, Kopple belongs to a tradition of documentary cinema that places the camera alongside social change and labour struggles.

Yet the essential question in evaluating Union Town is not simply its political position.

In a documentary about collective action, we must examine how the filmmaker moves from workers' individual experiences to broader structures of power and capital. Does the film merely present testimony about difficult working conditions, or does it also make visible the processes through which solidarity, disagreement, and collective decision-making emerge?

Compared with Free Zone, the two films present distinct forms of resistance. One is connected to an individual’s experience of repression and migration; the other to collective organization against economic structures.

These differences prevent us from grouping all the festival’s political documentaries simply because they share the theme of freedom.

The retrospective programme Cinema and Struggle: Latin America between East and West (Kino und Kampf: Latin America between East and West) explored related questions from a historical perspective.

The programme focused on Latin American political cinema in the 1960s and 1970s and its relationship to the Cold War's ideological climate, a period when many filmmakers saw the camera not merely as a tool for recording events, but as an instrument of participation in social struggle.

Yet the history of these works cannot be understood solely through their makers' political positions. Their editing, use of archival footage and narration, and the conditions under which they circulated and were screened on both sides of divided Germany all contributed to their historical meanings.

Politically committed cinema is not necessarily propaganda. But political commitment does not exempt a filmmaker from responsibility towards evidence and the complexity of reality.

The importance of political documentary becomes particularly clear when a film does more than articulate a position, allowing viewers to examine contradictions and form their own judgements.

Ultimately, the question of independence also plays out within family relationships.

In Growing Up, directed by Adam Roszkowski, a Polish teenager named Łukasz leaves home to pursue his dream of becoming a boxer and enrols in a sports boarding school.

Roszkowski follows his life over five years.

Within this structure, independence is not sudden but gradual. The relationship between mother and son, everyday anxieties, athletic training, and the first experiences of living independently all change over time.

Time in this film matters for more than recording a teenager’s coming of age. The camera’s prolonged presence lets us observe the distance between the dream of independence and its lived reality.

In Nicole Nicole, directed by Lauren Dallenbach and a Golden Dove winner in the Audience Competition, independence emerges through the relationship between a middle-aged woman and her elderly mother.

In one film, a teenager attempts to leave home; in the other, a woman in midlife still struggles to define her independent place within the family.

Yet the significance of comparing these films lies beyond their thematic similarity. The filmmaker’s position in relation to family relationships, and the way time is organized, differ in each work.

Seen from this perspective, the films become, by the end of the festival, a network of interconnected questions: Who is allowed to stay? Who is forced to leave? Who has the freedom to decide the course of their own life? And how can a camera reveal these differences without reducing them to simple, predetermined narratives?

The Festival Poster:

Two Identical Outfits, Two Unequal Positions

Among the visual designs of the festival’s 69th edition, a poster featuring two workwear-like forms raises a question that connects, unexpectedly, with many of the films in the programme.

Stefan Ibrahim, a Leipzig-based graphic designer and illustrator, has also created the festival’s visual identity in previous years.

In the official introduction to the poster, Ola Staszel referred to its openness to multiple interpretations and its connections to the labour movement, politics, feminism, and popular culture. Ibrahim, meanwhile, emphasized human movement, connections between people, and the roles of work and care in forming community.

Yet an artistic image is not necessarily confined to the intentions its creator declares.

The poster presents two figures in work clothes, positioned side by side. Their clothing appears identical. They have no faces, and there are no clear markers of age, nationality, gender, or social status.

Yet they occupy space differently.

One form appears to stand firmly on the ground, as though it is using some support, perhaps even an invisible stool, to distribute its weight and reduce fatigue. The other seems less stable, without the same option for rest.

This support may not actually exist as a separate object within the image. Yet we can infer its effect from the figures' positioning.

That is precisely what matters.

Sometimes structural support isn't something you can see directly. Its effects become visible in how people stand, how they move, and how much energy they must expend to maintain their position.

Two people may wear identical clothes, stand beside one another, and appear to enjoy equal conditions, while the resources their surroundings make available to them are profoundly unequal.

One can lean back for a moment, rest, and conserve energy. The other must endure greater pressure to remain in the same position.

Identical clothing does not guarantee equality of circumstances.

Yet the composition suggests more than inequality. The distance between the two forms and the way they stand also raise the possibility that their positions could be exchanged.

It is as though one is waiting for the other, perhaps anticipating the moment when they will change places.

From this possibility, two different interpretations emerge.

In the first, we might imagine a local inhabitant who enjoys the security of an established position and the support of their environment, standing alongside a migrant who hopes to find a secure place through that same support.

In another reading, the waiting figure could be someone intending to occupy the other’s position: not a migrant seeking safety, but an aggressor whose arrival may displace someone already there.

The image itself does not determine which interpretation is correct.

No definitive visual evidence identifies the two forms or reveals their intentions. This ambiguity lets us consider the poster beyond a simple opposition between two characters.

What remains constant in both interpretations is the question of position: Who has the right to stay? Who receives support? Who must expend more energy to maintain their place? And at what point can one person’s desire to settle become a threat to another?

In another version of the same composition, the colours change. The two forms appear in shades of blue, and one is constructed from parallel lines.

But changing the colour does not resolve the underlying question.

The structure of the relationship between the two forms remains.

Their appearance can be altered, colour differences reduced, or one figure transformed from a solid surface into a series of lines. None of these changes, however, necessarily corrects the unequal distribution of support and the ability to stand securely.

From a graphic perspective, this reveals an important difference between changing an image's surface and changing its structure.

Colour may alter the viewer’s emotional response, but as long as the spatial positions of the forms remain unchanged, the composition's suggested relationship can still be read.

This interpretation moves beyond the designer’s stated intentions, but it does not necessarily contradict them.

Ibrahim speaks of cooperation and people within a community. Yet every community, alongside the possibility of cooperation, must also confront questions about the distribution of responsibility, power, security, and the right to occupy space.

In this reading, the poster becomes an image of precisely that problem.

Here, its relationship with the festival’s films becomes clearer.

In Garden of Hope, migrants find an opportunity to build connections and a sense of belonging through a shared piece of land. In Concrete Land, a family faces the threat of losing the place upon which its life has been built. In Fracture, returning to one’s birthplace does not necessarily restore a sense of security, while in Free Zone, crossing a political border does not end every form of restriction.

In all these situations, the question is not simply whether someone is present in a place. It is whether they can remain there, receive support, and make decisions about their future.

Even in Union Town, workers struggle to establish conditions that let them live and work with greater security and autonomy.

Without referring directly to any of these films, the poster makes possible a visual interpretation of the questions they share.

This reading transforms the festival poster from a promotional image into an object of reflection on visual meaning and social relationships, a process equally important to documentary cinema.

An image shows us something, but what we understand by looking at it is not necessarily limited to the information visibly contained within it.

Doves That Rise Above the Ground

The 69th edition of DOK Leipzig concluded with the presentation of seven Golden Doves and two Silver Doves.

Letters from the Silenced Country, directed by Andrei Kutsila, won the Golden Dove in the International Competition for Feature-Length Documentary Film. In contrast, Concrete Land, directed by Asmahan Bkerat, received the Silver Dove in the same competition.

Transition, directed by Peter Badel and Chris Wright, won the Golden Dove in the German Competition for Feature-Length Documentary Film. In the animation competitions, Chris Sullivan’s The Orbit of Minor Satellites and Alexandre Siqueira’s Terminal received the Golden Doves for feature-length and short animated films.

Among the independent prizes, Garden of Hope received the film. land.sachsen Award, while Union Town won the Leipziger Ring Award. Free Zone was awarded the ver.di Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness.

Beyond their role in the subsequent circulation of the films, these awards also reflect part of the festival’s historical identity.

But no award should mark the end of critical judgement.

Through their selections and prizes, festivals help shape cinema’s collective memory. A winning film may gain opportunities for wider screening and distribution, while other works, even those of considerable cinematic merit, may receive little attention beyond a handful of festival screenings.

In a year when the festival’s new leadership was met with such strong audience attendance, the distinction between organizational success and artistic quality becomes especially important.

Themes such as migration, political repression, inequality, or war do not, in themselves, guarantee a film’s cinematic achievement. Its value depends on how the filmmaker organizes image, sound, and time, and on the relationship they establish with the reality being represented.

Yet among all the festival’s awards, perhaps the very shape of the Dove raises a different question.

Picasso’s Dove of Peace, historically associated with the peace movements that emerged after the Second World War, has been part of Leipzig’s visual identity since 1962.

Unlike many festival symbols that refer directly to cinema or the tools of filmmaking, this image points towards a human and political aspiration: the desire for peace.

Placed alongside the poster of the two workwear-like figures, it creates a striking contrast.

In the poster, the two figures remain bound to the question of where they can stand. One appears to have support, while the other lacks that possibility. The issue is the distribution of space and inequality in the right to remain.

A dove, however, does not need a stool or a support on the ground.

Its wings make movement possible through a space beyond the limitations of where one can stand.

Of course, in the real world, even the sky is not free from structures of power. Airspace borders, wars, military control, and restrictions on movement continue to exist. But within the language of art, the dove can make it possible to imagine a world in which one person’s right to stay or move does not necessarily depend on pushing another aside.

The contrast between the poster and the festival’s statuette therefore becomes more than a comparison of two graphic images.

If many of the festival’s films were concerned with home, land, ownership, displacement, and freedom, the dove offered an image of an aspiration beyond these limitations.

A statuette cannot remove the suffering of the films’ characters. It cannot restore a lost home, stop a war, or provide legal security to a migrant.

But art is not always expected to accomplish in the external world what its images suggest.

Sometimes an image matters because it allows us to imagine another possibility.

In this reading, the dove represents not the end of suffering, but the possibility of imagining liberation from it.

If, in Garden of Hope, a small plot of soil can become the beginning of belonging, and in Concrete Land, the loss of that same soil threatens a family’s entire way of life, the Dove of Peace offers an image of a world in which the human right to exist is not reduced to a competition for someone else’s place.

Perhaps this is why the statuette's shape carries emotional and human significance beyond its value as a cinematic award.

In the poster, two people may be waiting for one another to move so that they can reach the same support. But in the image of the dove, movement no longer necessarily depends on one taking the other’s place.

If we could find our wings, the sky would be vast enough for all of us to have a place in it.

Perhaps this is the most beautiful meaning one could imagine for a film festival’s award.

And yet cinema does not always end on such a hopeful image. Some films leave something within the viewer that neither the applause at the end of a screening, nor the presentation of an award, nor even the passing of several days can erase.

I did not return from Leipzig carrying only memories of films, conversations, and Golden Doves. I still have not been able to process the depth of the pain I brought back from watching a film about a father living with the deterioration of his memory. Nor has the regret of missing a film about children who are deaf or blind left me.

Perhaps this is precisely where documentary cinema continues to live, after the screen goes dark: in that place where there is no longer an image to watch, yet something in the way we see the world has changed forever.

Trains leave Leipzig station, but some images never leave us.