By Glenn Dunks
In October, I had the pleasure of being on my first virtual FIPRESCI jury. The International Federation of Film Critics is an organisation that has allowed me to visit and judge both the San Francisco and Stockholm festivals in the past. Since moving back home to Australia it’s has become much harder to do. Still, I wouldn’t have been able to attend DOK Leipzig in Germany for a multitude of reasons this year even without a global pandemic halting international travel. But I was able to attend this doc and animation festival from the relative comfort of my couch!
My fellow jurors were Yun-hua Chen (critic and film academy member from Germany) and Hrovje Puksek (programmer for the Festival of Tolerance in Zagreb in Croatia). We each watched 12 films from the international competition before landing on our winner: Darío Doria's Vicenta of Argentina.
Our statement...
By using clay figurines to tackle a powerful story of activism against Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Argentina, director Darío Doria reveals a crucial and painful fight for a woman’s right to choose. It celebrates a mother’s relentless dedication through moments of quiet perseverance alongside her daughter on bus rides between doctors waiting rooms and lawyer offices. A powerful example of how animation in documentaries can reveal unseen worlds that are usually out of reach.
As is the way with many festival juries, Vicenta was among my top contenders and was democratically annoited our winner, but not quite my favourite.
My two favourites were Jim Finn’s The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant and Alfonso Amador’s Camagroga.
The former is actually very well represented by its matter-of-fact title. Finn’s relatively short (61minute) feature is an adaptation of sorts of a collection of biographies as well as the work of several historical contributors and researchers. The film intertwines the story of Grant’s battles during the Civil War with those of the confederate massacres and the role black men and women played.
What really makes the film come alive is its breathtaking, exposure-flared 16mm photography, utilising the styles and elegant portraiture found other films under the urban landscape or postcard cinema banner—the likes of James Benning’s California Trilogy, Jenni Olson and Jørgen Leth. Within this Finn mixes narrated passages like Ken Burns, a avant-garde musical soundtrack, and playful battle recreations using roadside tourist trap trinkets, board games and playing cards. I found it an entrancing and divine work of experimental historical documentary.
Cameragoga offers a similarly tranquil experience, this time on a tiger nut farm in the Spanish village of Alboraya, near La Huerta de Valencia. Much longer, at two hours, this visual resplendent documentary blends captivating agricultural ethnography with one family’s quietly desperate quest for survival in the face of cement-lacquered progress. Presented in classic academy ratio with rounded edges to mimic old family slides, Amador’s film follows three generations of tiger nut farmers as they struggle with economic demands and a proposed highway construction that will cut into their land. Its most beautiful scenes are the simple ones detailing the processes of growing and cultivating and then milking to produce chufa. Some will undoubtedly compare Camagroga to last year’s Honeyland, but while there are similarities, I am sure Amador’s film will be harder for some to engage with. I, however, was swept away (a pun that you’ll understand once you watch it).
Elsewhere I and the rest of the jury were impressed by Asa Ushpiz’s Children from Israel and Palestine, focusing on the youth of this wartorn region who are growing increasingly politically aware in the streets of the West Bank. The film opens with one of its three primary subjects, 12-year-old Dima, being released from an Israeli prison for having attempted to stab Israeli soldiers, part of a wave of attacks known as ‘knife intifada’. She appears nervous in front of the throng of press that has assembled and grows increasingly aware of her family and outsiders attempting to force a narrative of abuse out of her that either did not happen or that she is uncomfortable discussing. She becomes friends with a strikingly confident online vlogger, while another, a six-year-old, whose father monitors the streets with CCTV cameras, goes to class and learns about war and freedom. Children is confronting in the way these young girls (and their male friends) are given early educations about the reality of life in Palestine. Too long, though, at 128 minutes.
Treading somewhat similar ground was Linas Mituka’s Roman’s Childhood, although it probably more accurately recalls the masterful (and Oscar-shortlisted) The Distant Barking of Dogs given its Lithuanian setting and its themes of a boy growing up in the realities of poverty. I thought it evoked quite potent ideas as Roman and his parents strive to make their squatters home livable. But at only 50 minutes, it struggles to blossom with broader themes like Dogs did beyond the struggles of living poor in this Baltic region. Cinematographer Kristina Sereikaitė is a real find, however.
Similarly grey is the debut feature from Daria Slyusarenko, Joy. Yes, the film is Russian so you know that title is ironic. This doc about a travelling circus (its most deadpan accidentally funny Russian way involves an escaped lynx roaming the streets of the village) focuses predominantly on two couple acts, each of which has a derisive tyrant and another more quiet and passive partner. I ultimately wanted nothing but good for the latter.
What I did not expect was for both Joy and Roman to feature scenes involving Baz Luhrmann movies (Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby respectively).
Among the rest, I won’t go much into the titles I had significant issues with and which didn’t factor into my own person voting. They included: Elsa Maury’s stomach-churning Considering the Ends, Hannah Jayanti’s confused Truth or Consequences (maybe if I was able to watch its VR sequences, I’d have understood their place?), as well as Laura Citarella and Mercedes Halfon’s The Poets Visit Juana Bignozzi (it peels back the filmmaking process like Kirsten Johnson, but here I wasn’t sure what it was attempting to say). Dieudo Hamadi’s Downstream to Kinshasa has some very strong elements, too, in its story of disabled victims of war in Congo attempting to get their government’s attention, but its middle act—the titular boat ride—felt tedious and unnecessarily long. It nonetheless won the festival’s top prize, The Golden Dove, and you can expect to see it make the festival rounds (virtual or otherwise).
The final two films are Lina Soualem’s Their Algeria about the director’s parents’ divorce after 62 years of marriage. The film is a flurry memories of their arranged marriage in Algeria and the journey to Thiers in France that left them as exiles. I admired Soualem’s generational drama as she explores the silences and the bonds within her family.
The last title is Shelly Silver’s Girls/Museum, which is a really interesting experiment. Taking the bones of, say, Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery and shifts it to Leipzig’s own Museum of Fine Arts. But here Silver uses it as a means of allowing a class of teenage girls to examine gender and the male gaze within art and contemplate the curation including the inherent sexism within art’s history. I’m not entirely sure the film itself is as good as the themes it unravels—although its capturing of the art itself is particularly luxuriating; and a moment where one girl disrupts the static camera to move to a painting she really likes is a strange kind of thrilling—but I appreciated the ideas it explored and hope it can be used well into the future for young audiences to critically comprehend art.
An extremely eclectic mix that highlighted a vast array of styles and formats that really speaks to documentary's elastic and evolving medium. The festival, too, was a wonderful experience. I hope to one day visit it in person.