Leipzig 2007

FIPRESCI Prize: "Behave"

The International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, is one of the oldest film festivals in Germany. It includes, amongst others, a new competition for young talent, an extensive retrospective reflecting critically on its eventful history as the GDR's unique A-list festival — and, of course, the International Competition for Documentary Films on which the FIPRESCI jury focused.
    This year's international documentary competition consisted of 22 films, mixing shorts with mid- and feature-length films. According to its early history, Leipzig seems to be trying to achieve a balance between "journalism [politics respectively] and poetry" in its selection, quoting Barbara Wurm's article on the Dziga Vertov retrospective in the festival of 1960, published in the anniversary book "Images of a Divided World".
    The films in competition, though varying in quality, showed a broad range of documentary approaches — from the digital diary in a hotel room in Jerusalem (John Smith's remarkable Short Dirty Pictures) to Jean Paul, a terrifying "snuff" movie by Francesco Uboldi, where the subject finds the filmmaker rather than the other way around, to Barbet Schroeder's monumental documentary Terror's Advocate, which reveals a global conspiracy through the enigmatic figure of the lawyer Jacques Vergès.
    With Behave (Juízo), by director Maria Augusta Ramos, the FIPRESCI jury actually chose a winner that accomplished the aforementioned fusion of politics and poetry, insofar as the film portrays a judicial system in all its weaknesses, expressing the consequences of the courts' decisions in a strong, fresh and absolutely appropriate cinematic language.
    The Leipzig festival is very ambitious, reflecting the city's status as one of the most relevant and rapidly flourishing artistic communities in eastern Germany. Eager to expand his operation, festival director Claas Danielsen made a point of asking the city in his opening speech to increase the festival’s funding for future editions. (Julia Teichmann)

50th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, October 29 — November 4, 2007,
www.dok-leipzig.de
FIPRESCI Prize: Behave (Juízo) by Maria Augusta Ramos. Details

Reports

The Law of the Documentary, the Documentary of the Law. Gabriele Barrera reviews Maria Augusta Ramos' Behave. "It's a fresh, sharp commentary about the life trajectory of the Rio de Janeiro's minors in front of the law — and in front of Ramos' camera, in its turn totally rigid and entirely helpless before the inexorable violence of Brazilian society, from the favelas to the prison, from the prison to the favelas, ad libitum".
East Meets West, and Themes Emerge. Marcin Gizycki reads the undercurrents at Leipzig. "The post-communist landscape of former Soviet republics and other Eastern European countries still attracts festival programmers and filmmakers."
A Fifty-Year Window on the World. Julia Teichmann recounts the history of Festival. "Pablo Picasso's peace dove became the symbol of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film in 1962", she writes about the beginnings. "For the Leipzig film festival, the dove was in ideological alignment with its 1961 motto: 'The World's Films, for the World's Peace'".

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