Katalog 2004 - DOK.fest München

Introduction
Dear friends of documentary cinema,
dear Dok.Fest fans,
This year we are again delighted to present an extremely varied and
informative best-of-documentaries program.
16 films will be eligible in the international competition for the “Documentary
Film Award” sponsored by the Bavarian broadcaster Bayerischer
Rundfunk and for the festival award, “The Special Documentary”.
Another 49 films will be presented in the international program
and in the section Aspects of Future, with its focus on India and Israel.
The section New Films from Bavaria will introduce works by students
of the Munich and Würzburg film schools, as well as films by renowned
directors and independent documentary filmmakers. The film
and television fund FilmFernsehFonds Bayern will be awarding its
“Documentary Talent Award”.
We are happy to announce an open master class with Peter Liechti,
organized by the Munich Film School. Liechti will discuss his film
essay Lucky Jack, which is running in the official competition.
“The Art of Documentary Film: Politics” will be examined in a discussion
following the screening of Marijke Jongbloed’s Smile & Wave at
the Filmmuseum.
In its BR Special, TV broadcaster Bayerisches Fernsehen will present
two films from the series “When I think of Germany” and “Somewhere
in Bavaria”. The films Wer bin ich? Schlesische Lebensläufe and
Liebe und andere Wege zum Glück are further examples of the outstanding
quality of the BR documentary programs.
For the fourth year in a row, LiteraVision, the television competition
honoring programming related to books and authors, will be held parallel
to the Festival at the Munich literature center Literaturhaus. We
will show one of the nominated films: Der Unzugehörige. Peter Weiss.
Out of competition, we will also be screening S21, La machine de mort
khmère rouge/S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine by Rithy Phan,
which received the award of the European Film Academy, the Prix
Arte.
You may look forward with us to an especially good year with many
great moving documentaries, to the art of precise observation and,
above all, to films with enormous narrative power. Andres Veiel spent
seven years working on Die Spielwütigen. Rakesh Sharma recorded
and edited hundreds of hours of material for Final Solution. The directors
of Rhythm is it!, Mahssomim / Checkpoint and Smile & Wave returned
again and again to the locations of their stories – as did the
makers of The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan, Dix-sept
ans and Garden. This involvement is the source of the extraordinarily
intimate, and rarely achieved, contact with their protagonists. Coincidence
had a hand in the directing of Parallel Lines, and even more so
in The Revolution Will Not be Televised – which, as a “live” shoot of a
coup d’Etat is already considered one of the great documents of film
history. Carpatia succeeds in conveying a sense of space and time
that we have already forgotten, Kanalschwimmer / Channel swimmers
portrays, in masterly images, the tough endurance of its heroes
and the film crew. Hans im Glück / Lucky Jack is an enchanting exercise
in narrative freedom – Montaigne on celluloid. Tintin et moi /
Tintin and I exhausts every possible means to transform a gripping
sound document into sensual cinema; Hollands Licht / Dutch Light
answers a highly academic question with imagination and great
enthusiasm for the creation of images; De fem benspaend / The Five
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