German Film @ Canada - Goethe-Institut

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, Continue reading "DOK Leipzig programmer Ralph Eue on..." »

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. Continue reading "FORGET ME NOT, an homage to personal &..." »