Documentary films tell real-life stories, portray genuine characters and raise questions about social realities.
Each November since 2003 at DOK Leipzig, Germany's oldest and Europe's second-largest documentary film festival, the Goethe-Institut has been awarding an outstanding German doc and then showing it to audiences worldwide. The Goethe-Institut Toronto will present recent winners in May 2017.
This year's Goethe-Institut jury -including last year's winning director Lutz Dammbeck and international film experts from Germany's cultural centres in 90 countries- honoured the film
TO BE A TEACHER by Jakob Schmidt, who at the same time also won the DEFA Sponsoring Prize and the Healthy Workplaces Award. The film tells the emotional story of three young teachers-in-the-making that are thrown into the (harsh) reality of the German educational system. The director accompanies the student-teachers as they leave university to tackle their first two stressful years of on-the-job training, testing and grading their first classes while still being assessed and tested themselves. The German title ZWISCHEN ZWEI STUEHLEN translates literally as "sitting on the fence," which captures the experience of many young aspiring school teachers.
Jakob Schmidt was born in 1989. A student at the prestigious Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, he has directed several shorts and now his first feature-length documentary.
Eligible were the previously mentioned films --CAHIER AFRICAIN (which won the Silver Dove in the International Competition), NEO RAUCH, PAVLENSKY-- plus 13 more. Past winners have included THE HALFMOON FILES by Philip Scheffner and Dammbeck's OVERGAMES. The award comes with a € 2000 cash prize. In addition, the Goethe-Institut acquires the rights and arranges for subtitling in at least eight languages, making the film accessible to a worldwide audience.
The prize is awarded to a recent feature-length German documentary film from the German or International Competition at DOK Leipzig. Artistic criteria are as important in the decision-making as the winning film's relevance for the current German socio-political discourse, but also the degree to which it transcends its culture of origin and facilitates a global conversation.
by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
image: Goethe-Institut
