51. INTERNATIONAL LEIPZIG FESTIVAL FOR DOCUMENTARY AND ANIMATED FILMS
27 October – 2 November 2008
Special Programme: Animadoc – More Than Just Reality?
The Best Animated Documentaries of More Than Three Decades
Tuesday-Friday 5p.m. Passage Kinos Leipzig
Wednesday- Saturday 14 a.m. CineStar Leipzig
In the past few years, filmmakers, festivals and audiences have become more and more aware of animated documentaries. These films fascinate by their deliberate combination of documentary content with the artistic and technical possibilities of animation. Animation offers a new level of visualisation, especially for subjects where there is no visual material or where the material has lost some of its power.
At DOK Leipzig, the programme series “Animadoc”, an annual screening of the best
animated documentaries, was established in 1997. Leipzig is the only festival in the world that has offered this artistic and exciting sub-genre a platform for the past twelve years and, in the process, found an interface between the festival’s documentary and animation programmes.
This year’s retrospective “Animadoc – More Than Just Reality” features the best and most exciting works from the past 30 years.
The majority of the 29 films come from the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. France, Belgium and Sweden are also represented as countries of production. Almost all the films have won prizes at international festivals. “Never like the First Time” by Jonas Odell, for example, won the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlinale. The programme boasts three Academy Award winners: “Frank Film” by Frank Mouris, “Ryan” by Chris Landreth and “The Moon and the Sun” by John Canemaker. “Ryan”, which won the Academy Award in 2005, had already been awarded the Goldene Taube at DOK Leipzig 2004.
The programme is divided into four sections, each of them dedicated to films dealing with a specific social issue, in order to reveal connections – in spite or precisely because of the filmmakers’ very different approaches and the various animation techniques.
The first section, “What’s Normal Again?”, will revolve around disease and handicaps or different philosophies of life. Tim Webb’s film, for example, deals with autistic children (“A Is for Autism”), while Shira Avni’s “John and Michael” tells the story of a handicapped couple. Despite the weighty subject matter, there is some humour, too – in Paul Vester’s “Abductees”, people under hypnosis talk about the experience of being kidnapped by space aliens.
Personal life stories are at the heart of the second section, “Me, Myself and the Others”. “Frank Film” by Frank Mouris, though basically a filmmaker’s monologue about his life, is very far from boring. Another autobiographical film, and just as surprising, is John Canemaker’s “The Moon and the Son”, in which the filmmaker enters into an imaginary dialogue with his father, while Louise Wilde in “My Friend Marjorie” turns her attention to an old lady who looks back on her life. Jonas Odell’s contribution is both irritating and revealing – in “Never Like the First Time”, people of different ages talk about their “first time”.
War and trauma are the main subjects of section “Stories of Survival””. In this programme, filmmakers who get to grips with their own or near relatives’ experiences speak up. Irra Verbitsky, for example, talks about her war childhood in two films entitled “Flashback from the Past”, while Sheila Sofian interviewed a young Bosnian boy about his war memories in “A Conversation with Haris”.
The last section, “Stolen Lives”, is dedicated to women who have to cope with serious crises in their lives. The films are about sexual abuse in the family (“Daddy’s Little Bit of Dresden China”) or violent abuse, for example in marriage (“Repetition Compulsion”). These films are striking examples of one advantage of animated documentaries: animation enables the women to talk openly about the brutality they suffered – without giving away their identities.
Annegret Richter
More information:
http://www.dok-leipzig.de/v2/cms/en/118/programme-2008/animated-film/page652.html
DOK Summit Panel Discussion
The Animated Documentary – More than just ONE SIDE of Reality!
Thursday, 30 October, 2008, 11 a.m., ZGF Leipzig
At the DOK Summit accompanying the special programme “More Than Just Reality – The Best Animated Documentaries of More Than Three Decades”, researchers and filmmakers will discuss some important issues of this by now well-established animation sub-genre. The discussion will focus on the possibilities of animation in representing documentary content. The dissolving boundaries between the genres of documentary and fiction film show that it is high time for a re-orientation regarding genre-specific patterns of representation. The panel wants to offer a platform where the advantages of this kind of film, but also the difficulties of visualizing certain subjects, can be discussed. Practical examples will illustrate the filmmakers’ artistic standards and the individual techniques used in animated documentaries.
The panel will include Otto Alder, founder of the Leipzig Animadoc programme series. 13 years ago, he recognised the necessity of introducing a programme that would combine animation and documentary, creating the world’s first programme of animated documentaries. He has remained faithful to this genre until today. Additional guests include filmmakers Dennis Tupicoff (Australia), Tim Webb (Great Britain) and Sheila Sofian (USA), whose films will be screened in the Animadoc programme. Annegret Richter of Leipzig University, who conducted a detailed study of the genre in her PhD thesis, will talk about the scientific background of global production in this area. The discussion will be hosted by Jörg Taszman.
