DOKLeipzig Opens Tonight
… and the local Leipziger Volkszeitung has an interview with festival director Claas Danielsen, who stresses that the 53rd edition of the festival could need a couple of days more for a festival that he predicts will have many full houses this coming week as it had the previous week. 347 productions from 58 countries, 223 of them documentaries, the rest animation – and 4 competition programmes.
And a lot of meetings for professionals, looking for funding or to get their knowledge about the industry updated. Belgian filmmakers come as a delegation as does the Chileans, who will be extra warmly welcomed, be sure of that. To follow up on the small text yesterday on the miners, I read a long article in the Sunday Observer estimating that the succesful rescue and the solidarity expressed in and outside Chile will finally take away the label of Chile being only remembered for the death squadrons of Pinochet.
What is in the competition programme, Danielsen is asked: … again many political films have been made that deal with the themes of our time… told with many different kinds of handwriting, which do not care about the old dogmatic documentary thinking but go essayistic, poetic, playful, imaginative and even experimental. Later on in the interview, Danielsen praises the Polish documentary as well as the Finnish – readers of filmkommentaren.dk will know that this is very often the same estimate made here.
