Interview reposted from May 2017 on the occasion of the 61st DOK Leipzig 2018: North America's biggest documentary film festival Hot Docs brings hundreds of films to Canadian audiences each spring. The Goethe-Institut added a coda to the 2017 festival with selected German documentaries that won the Goethe Documentary Prize at DOK Leipzig Festival over recent years.
A conversation about cultural specificity in documentary filmmaking and international vs. national festival programming that we kicked off with DOK Leipzig's new-ish lead programmer Ralph Eue:
Jutta Brendemühl: When you took up your new position as head of programming for venerable DOK Leipzig festival, you commented: “The films that I envisage in the program are ideally films with transformative power,
that make a viewer into somebody different, films that absolutely had to be made and whose urgency comes across.” Quickly describe the practical decision-making process – lone or collaborative, one round or three?
Ralp Eue: The decision-making process is distributed on the shoulders of six individuals. Due to our histories and mooring in other current projects within a diverse spectrum,
we stand for very different positions, preferences and priorities. To this extent, the
decision-making process is absolutely collaborative but we hope not conciliatorily consensualist. We attempt to avoid simple or numerical majority decisions (e.g. through voting and counting). Every film that ends up on the shortlist is discussed in depth. The final decision for a film in the program does not have a fixed number of rounds.
JB: Of the three films we are showing in Toronto that won the Goethe Documentary Prize at DOK Leipzig –PEAK, LAND IN SIGHT, FORGET ME NOT—all are fairly known in Germany, none played at a Toronto festival before. Why is that you think?
RE: That isn’t necessarily a fault. I think that every committee sets different focuses in its work, operates with different backgrounds and perspectives. And
even if we are dedicated to the same objective here and over there–-which is to give artistic documentary films a stage and promote them– the assessment of what films those are will probably diametrically diverge.
Wouldn’t it be more problematic if the films were exactly the same ones? Probably every year something quite similar and quite simple will play a role as well: that
films treated as ‘hot docs’ at a spring festival will not be quite so ‘hot’ come autumn – and vice versa. To take a current example: Sergei Loznitsa’s film of last year, AUSTERLITZ, was shown in Leipzig and in Toronto.
Premiere and subsequent screening policies of festivals also play a role in conjunction with this issue, as do the strategies, priorities and desires of filmmakers or producers. Added to this is perhaps a certain national (or continental) basic format in the estimation of
what a film can, should and must do: in North America the story –what is told– has more primacy, in Europe more how it is told.
JB: What is the strength or attraction of German documentary filmmaking for the global festival circuit?
RE: I would really rather not answer that question. Although I live in Germany and although I work for a German festival, I do not see myself as a lobbyist for German film. There are already institutions that are doing excellent work in this field. I’d rather not tinker in their work! If I may talk about my personal preferences, I believe that films whose origins are clearly obvious are those taken up with benefits from others elsewhere. In answering this question,
I am reminded of something Akira Kurosawa said about what a film should be: it is important that films show, on the one hand, that everything, be it grief or joy, is the same everywhere in the world and on the other hand, that the same thing occurs everywhere differently. And most important is that the
on the one hand and
on the other hand must be visible simultaneously.
JB: What qualities or initiatives do you appreciate or envy most at which international film festival?
RE: When it’s about creating market places and fields of experimentation for mutual exchange. All festivals that I know attempt to do this equally and yet they each spell out this project differently. To put it into a slogan, perhaps: Workshops of diversity?
JB: Recent favourite Canadian doc?
RE: OSCAR. A fantastic brief portrait of Oscar Peterson. Animated and documentary sequences – the blending of the two genres, is also a ‘trademark’ of DOK Leipzig that results in a virtuosic big screen fabric.
Ralph Eue is a writer, translator and curator. He studied German, Romance languages and architecture in Marburg, Paris and Frankfurt and is teaching at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) and the University of Vienna. Editor of the journal "Filmkritik" until 1984. Curator of the Berlinale Retrospektive 2005. Consultant for cultural institutions worldwide. Programmer at DOK Leipzig. Lives in Berlin.
interview by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
image: OSCAR courtesy NFB
