DOK Leipzig 2026 | Behind the scenes of capitalism

The highlight of the festival: Andrei Kutsila's "Letters From The Silenced Country" Photo: Dok Leipzig The documentary style of the 80s and 90s is finally a thing of the past. Anyone who went to a cinema at the just-ended Leipzig Documentary Film Festival (DOK Leipzig) in the hope of getting some interesting information with nice illustrations and voiceover in Heinz Sielmann mode will probably have been somewhat disappointed: documentaries in 2026 have long since become an art form.

Music, images and animations are increasingly playing a role; the films have narratives, rhythms and often follow a formal logic. This occasionally leads to exaggerations, such as in the quite beautiful “Holy Wood Dust” by Victor Kossakovsky, which shows, among other things, production processes in the Christmas tree industry and thus provides an impressive insight behind the scenes of capitalism, but whose images are primarily illustrations of orchestral music. And so the artistic form overlays the content in such a way that the film at times seems like a 110-minute music clip with trees.

Elsewhere, artificialization leads to magnificent results, such as in Andrei Kutsila's "Letters From The Silenced Country", perhaps the highlight of the festival. Kutsila tells his story of Belarusian dissidence and the brutal repression against it using several individual fates, combines them with a dark animation that is reminiscent of dark fantasy and graphic novels, and thus creates a production that not only tells the horror, but also aestheticizes it in an appropriately drastic way. The film won both the MDR Film Prize and the Golden Dove Long Film International, which was awarded 10,000 euros, one of the two main prizes.

In addition to the rapidly changing narrative styles based on fictional productions, what is striking is the omnipresent depiction of world capitalism, which is finally in crisis. No matter where and whoever sets up a camera in this world, the impression is that it can only capture the devastation of decades of value exploitation regimes and patriarchy, which have turned everything and everyone into a commodity and keep the female part of the world population in particular depressed and afraid of losing their existence.

This also applies to Helena Třeštíková's films, even if the grand dame of the long-term portrait trusts much more conservative narrative structures than, for example, Kutsila. Třeštíková accompanied several people from their Czech homeland over decades, once again creating impressive filmic CVs.

The portraits of the Czech rock singer Bára Basiková (“Bára – Diary of a Rockstar”) and a Prague couple (“A Marriage Story”) primarily show the breakdown of relationships due to circumstances. Basiková in particular struggled throughout her life to make ends meet in the changing family constellations in which she lived with her three spouses, as well as with the sensitivities of her male partners, who in various ways could not stand taking responsibility for their shared life and everyday life in the shadow of a famous woman.

In general, the festival films that deal with résumés are full of problematic men and toxic relationships, and so one of the festival's most emotional moments is perhaps the big exception, in which an 80-year-old woman pays her decades-long, significantly younger partner a rare big compliment: She has gotten so old not only because of her strong physical condition, but also "because you treated me so well."

In general, the festival films that deal with CVs are full of problematic men and toxic relationships.

The scene comes from Ina Borrmann's "Guten Abend, du Schöne", which opened the festival and for which Borrmann identified protagonists from the book "Guten Morgen, du Schöne" by Maxie Wander, which was published in the GDR in 1977, and in which she tells their life stories, so to speak, to the end. Wander's book was a great success at the time, and one wishes the same to the film, which was told with great empathy and very cleverly.

Another portrait film, “Transition” by Peter Badel and Chris Wright, won the second main prize, the Goldene Taube German Documentary Film. It portrays the extremely controversial filmmaker Thomas Heise, who died in 2024 and whose life story also leads through the history of Germany.

Things are a little more raw and youthful in “Free Zone,” which received the Verdi Prize for Solidarity. This also shows the special value of the festival: the cinemas were almost always very well attended, and so films like “Free Zone” get an audience that they would hardly get in the usual afternoon screenings in small arthouse cinemas. “Free Zone” shows a young refugee from Iran who not only struggles with his homelessness, but also has to reflect on his attitude to violent actions in the Athens squatter district of Exarchia.

“A Fire There” also exemplifies this fact. Here we see young people from Georgia thinking about their future and becoming political as they grow up. The film clearly shows that a generation is also growing up in the capitalist periphery that is well informed politically. And young people draw their conclusions from the extreme unequal distribution of life opportunities and wealth and the role they are given in it: the current youth uprising is unlikely to be the last.

The audience effect is particularly clear in terms of the many short films that were shown in the program. This gave great little (and especially short) masterpieces a big stage. “Patronymic,” for example, in which a Ukrainian woman explains pointedly why she had to give up her suffix against her will while fleeing, or “They’re Here,” which won the Golden Dove for the best international documentary short film and documents the resistance of the people of Minneapolis against the violent attacks on migrants by the notorious ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

This is how the DOK Leipzig came to an end on Sunday. Critically, it should be noted that the majority of films were shown in English or with only English subtitles, which excluded a part of the older or less educated population, or that the dominant perspective, despite some exceptions, was very white and Eurocentric.

That doesn't change the fact that those responsible have put together a remarkably clever and sometimes rousing program and put together a very pleasantly organized festival.

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