18th BERLIN YOUTH-MEDIA-FESTIVAL FROM 13 TO 17 MAY 2009

DOK Leipzig is pleased to announce that it is donating the first ever DOC-CLIP award for best documentary film at this year’s Berlin Youth-Media-Festival.
Very few festivals in Germany offer children and young people the opportunity to present their own films to the public. The Berlin Youth-Media-Festival, which is preparing its 18th edition this year, was founded to close this gap.
The festival is largely organised by the young people themselves, with media pedagogues providing no more than the organisational and financial framework. The Berlin festival offers a wide range of inventive, unusual, funny and independent minded films. The aesthetics and quality of the films are important, as well as their ideas and approach.
While making your own film is an important step towards developing media literacy, reflecting your own work, gathering experience and getting further education are just as relevant. Thus, the Berlin Youth-Media-Festival offers an International Competition, workshops and interesting discussions – a driving force of communication between interested filmmakers and viewers and a study workshop in how to deal with the public.

DOK Leipzig wishes all participants exciting and moving cinema experiences, enlightening discussions and lots of fun with the films! We are committed to promoting young filmmakers!

Information about the 18th Youth-Media-Festival can be found at www.berliner-medienfestival.de

The programme can be downloaded here:

 The online platform “20 Years of Democracy in Film”, launched in co-operation with the festivals One World Prague, One World Bratislava, Verzio Budapest and Watch Docs Warsaw, is going to present documentary and animated films by East and Central European filmmakers.

18 contributions from the years of 1990 to 2007 that deal with central issues of the social and political transformation processes of the last decades will be available as free streamings until the end of the year, including outstanding, multiple award-winning works by such renowned filmmakers as Jan Švankmajer, Maciej Janusz Drygas, Pavel Koutecký, Marko Škop and Tamás Almási. Films by Gerd Kroske, Thomas Heise and Wolfgang Ettlich will represent Germany. More films will be added to the list in October 2009.

Grouped in five thematic categories - Coming to Terms with the Past, the Development of Democracy, Social Insecurity, Migration, and New Social Movements -, the films will be complemented by articles providing context and promoting a cross-national discussion in the online forum.

In addition, the initiative will organise accompanying events addressing students at humanities faculties in the respective countries. DOK Leipzig will offer a course on “Images of Change – A Comparison of Eastern European Documentary Film Practices after 1989” at the Department of European Ethnology of Berlin’s Humboldt University in the 2009 summer term.

The time has come!

From now on, productions can be submitted online to the 52nd International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film and also for the DOK Market Digital.

Entry Deadline is 10 July 2009.

Find our Entry Form here:

During the 13th Filmfest Schleswig-Holstein "Augenweide" from 12-15 March 2009 Matthias Heeder from the Leipzig selection comitee presented four films of the 51. International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film.

"Chainsaw" by Dennis Tupicoff, Australien, 2007, 4:10 min.
You shouldn’t toy with a husband’s emotions. Or chainsaws, for that matter. Men, women, chainsaws, bullfighters, and cowboys all swirl together in this stunningly animated spectacle of love and revenge.

"Goleshovo by Illian Metev, United Kingdom, Bulgarien, 2008, 34 min.
Only 59 people live in Goleshovo. The young people moved away, only old women and a slightly deranged aged priest are left. Bulgarian film student Ilian Metev follows the quiet daily peasant’s lives of those who remained. With humour and precision he observes the old women at work in the village...

"Till It Hurts" by Marcin Koszalka, Poland 2008, 25 min.
Oh, how beautiful life could be, if only the things that happen between two lovers counted. But life is different, especially if a dominant mother who has ruled her son’s life for 53 years stands between the man and the woman. And so, after an idyllic opening sequence, this short film unfolds the whole horror of a mother-son-relationship shaped by fear, insults and plain paranoia.

"Skhizein" by Jérémy Clapin, France 2008, 35 min.
Having been struck by a 150-ton meteorite, Henry has to adapt to living precisely 91 centimetres from himself ... If he wants to open a door, sit on a chair, or pick up the phone, from now on he just has to do so from 91 centimetres away.