Once a year, at the second largest documentary film festival in Europe, DOK Leipzig, an outstanding film is awarded the Goethe Documentary Film Prize by the Goethe-Institut’s jury. First presented in 2003, the award comes with 2,000 euro prize money. The Goethe-Institut also acquires the rights to the film and arranges the subtitling in eight languages so that it can be shown at the 160 Goethe-Instituts throughout the world. The jury is chaired by a documentary filmmaker or international expert and composed of film experts from the Goethe-Instituts. They consider the aesthetic merit of the documentaries as well as relevant perspectives on Germany and the world that contribute to an intercultural socio-political discourse. The Goethe-Institut Toronto presents three of these recent award-winning documentaries in the series GOETHE FILMS “Peak: German Docs” from May 11-23.
FORGET ME NOT prevailed against 12 other documentaries when it was awarded the Goethe Documentary Film Prize 2012 and will be co-presented with Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival. It convinced the jury because “the film -- a sensitively told homage by the filmmaker to his mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease – maintains the difficult balance between personal sadness and artistic distance.
