Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 19, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Under the heading “BREATHLESS — Dominance of the Moment,” five extraordinary artistic approaches to the subject of time were created with the support of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, according to the festival. Together with 3sat, DOK Leipzig inspired four directors to address the subject of security through film.
World Premiere: BREATHLESS — DOMINANCE OF THE MOMENT
The world’s longest piece of music, time loops in the Czech hinterland, post-industrial deceleration in America, boredom as a way of life and an attempt to escape hectic urban life—these are five perspectives on our world, five artistic viewpoints, and above all five extraordinary films about time and the acceleration of everyday life.
The films are the result of a call for submissions launched jointly by DOK Leipzig, Prague’s Institute of Documentary Film (IDF), and ZIPP German-Czech Cultural Projects, an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. The call on BREATHLESS—time and the acceleration of our lived reality—received an enormous response. One year earlier, five documentary-film projects from the Czech Republic and Germany were selected from more than 130 submissions. Away from the aesthetic mainstream, they develop a bold and innovative perspective on dealing with time in an accelerated society.
Rainer Komers works on an essayistic journey through a former mining region in the USA (“Milltown, Montana”). Anca Miruna Lazarescu accompanies a performance of a John Cage work in Halberstadt, eastern Germany, intended to continue sounding until the year 2640 (“One Day Today Will Be Once”). Jan Peters and Marie-Catherine Theiler explore therapies for deceleration with plenty of humour and irony (“Time’s Up”). Jan Gogola attempts a surreal approach to eternity through a grandmother’s diary (“I Love My Boring Life”), while Karel Zalud follows the aesthetic traces of Luis Buñuel and investigates the physical dimension of time (“Phantom of Liberty II”).
“With the project ‘BREATHLESS — Dominance of the Moment,’ we wanted on the one hand to support bold and creative documentary ideas with a strong authorial signature that otherwise would have had little chance of being realised. On the other hand, we wanted to promote cultural dialogue between Germany and the Czech Republic and show how dynamic and diverse the documentary-film scene is in both countries,” said Festival Director Claas Danielsen. Another unique feature of the project: during project development, the filmmakers received support in several workshops from internationally experienced mentors and producers.
After months of collaborative development, two workshops, and production and completion, the five resulting short artistic documentaries now celebrate their world premieres at DOK Leipzig and the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. The collection of five documentaries opens in German cinemas on December 30, 2009. (Distributor: Real Fiction) Premiere screenings: Thursday, October 29, 2009, 7:00 p.m. — DOK Leipzig—
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World Premiere: MY LIFE IN SECURITY
In January 2008, the film editorial department of German-language cultural broadcaster 3sat and DOK Leipzig launched a call for submissions on a subject that directly affects everyone and will shape our lives for a long time: security. More than 200 filmmakers applied two years earlier with ideas on “My Life in Security”; four were selected following an intensive selection process.
“Those responsible at 3sat deserve sincere thanks for their willingness to engage with this extraordinary documentary-film project, which pushed the personnel capacity of the small but excellent film editorial department to its limits,” said Festival Director Claas Danielsen. “I am all the more pleased that we were able to make a statement for formally ambitious and politically committed documentary film. The first film, ‘Stories About Food’ by Hans-Dieter Grabe, celebrated its world premiere at DOK Leipzig the previous year. The other three are coming directly from the editing rooms to the big screen in time for the 2009 festival.”
In “Stories About Food,” Grabe used archive material from earlier films and autobiographical sketches to demonstrate impressively the existential importance that satisfying basic needs such as food has for people’s sense of security. The younger colleagues examine very different aspects of the subject in their films: Katharina Pethke shows how the threatened loss of work leads to profound insecurity in her formally unusual film “It Must Burn Within You.” In “Hacker,” Alexander Biederstein delves deeply into the scene of the same name and investigates what remains of the great myth of these computer guerrillas, who once made the central computers of NASA or the Pentagon unsafe. Kerstin Nickig accompanies refugees from Chechnya on their uncertain search for a new home and, in “No Place,” makes hauntingly clear that there is almost no compassion in Europe for these traumatised victims of war.
The world premieres of the three films take place on Wednesday, October 28, Thursday, October 29, and Friday, October 30, each at 8:00 p.m.
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