The film programme of DOK.fest München. At the cinema. At home.

3 to 14 May 2023 at the Munich venues
8 to 21 May 2023 @home

As always, DOK.fest München opens the view out to the world: with 130 of the best and most current international documentaries from 55 countries. Our goal is the greatest possible participation in our films, which is why we bring them to the big screen in Munich cinemas as well as to home screens throughout Germany: DOK.fest stays dual.

Please enter the festival edition you would like to find out more about a film in the year field.

DOK.guest Canada

LITTLE PEOPLE BIG DREAMS (China, Singapore 2014, Chun Kit Mak). A theme park where people of short stature live in their own dwarf world – it sounds like something from the 19th Century. In the Chinese “Dwarves Empire,” a place that is simultaneously a ghetto, a spectacle and a sanctuary, it is a cynical reality.

#Human Rights/Migration, #Asia

THE LAST MOOSE IN AOLUGUYA – HAN DA HAN (China 2014, Gu Tao). Weijia is one of the Reindeer Evenkis, a minority group in northeast China. Displaced by the government and deprived of the opportunity to hunt, all they have left is alcohol and stories of days gone by. A striking film about their loss of identity and lack of agency.

#Human Rights/Migration, #Asia

DOK.international Main Competition

OF MEN AND WAR (France, Switzerland 2014, Laurent Bécue-Renard). The Pathway Home is a facility for soldiers who have served in Iraq and have post-traumatic stress disorder. Blighted by anxiety, aggression and relationship problems, they speak of their bloody experiences of war in group therapy sessions. Bécue-Renard closely observes their difficult journey back to civilian life.

#North America, #Human Rights/Migration

SOMETHING BETTER TO COME (Denmark, Poland 2014, Hanna Polak). A totally normal life, like most people take for granted, is a long way away for Yula. She lives in Europe’s biggest landfill site, a few kilometres from Moscow. The only thing left for her is hope for a better future. Far from social romanticism and without dwelling on misery, in poetic images the film tells a present-day fairytale of humanity in an inhumane world.

#SOS Nominees, #Eastern Europe, #Human Rights/Migration, #Coming-of-Age, #14jugendfrei

THE QUEEN OF SILENCE (Germany, Poland 2014, Agnieszka Zwiefka). Denisa is partially deaf and battles her way through the tough everyday life in a Roma community somewhere in Poland. The ten-year-old has never learned to talk, yet she loves to dance and to create her own colourful and bright musical world.

#Dance/Theatre, #SOS Nominees, #Eastern Europe, #Human Rights/Migration, #14jugendfrei

THOSE WHO FEEL THE FIRE BURNING (Netherlands 2014, Morgan Knibbe). A man drowns when he falls from a refugee boat but his ghost reaches Europe, wanders through the towns and observes the chaos. He sees the dark side of Europe: people who arrived with hope and are now stuck. An experiment that lies somewhere between documentary and fiction.

#Human Rights/Migration, #Cineasts

DOK.horizonte Competition – Cinema of Urgency

CE QU'IL RESTE DE LA FOLIE – REMNANCE OF MADNESS (France, Senegal 2014, Joris Lachaise). A psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Dakar: who gets cured here and by whom? The psychiatrists consult with traditional healers. An intelligent, visually elaborate investigation of insanity and approaches towards it in postcolonial society.

#Identity/Life Crisis, #Human Rights/Migration, #Africa

EL HOGAR AL REVÉS – UPSIDE DOWN HOME (Mexico 2014, Itzel Martínez del Cañizo). Over the course of a year, the filmmaker followed a group of young people in a modern working-class housing estate in Tijuana. The parents are absent; they work day and night to pay their debts. The children’s loneliness is the price they pay for the dream of having their own home.

#Latin America, #Human Rights/Migration, #14jugendfrei, #SOS Nominees

LA MORT DU DIEU SERPENT – DEATH OF THE SERPENT GOD (France 2014, Damien Froidevaux). 20 year-old Koumba is thrown out of France. She has to go back to Senegal, a land that she doesn’t know – she was just two years old when she and her parents left for Paris. In this sensational long-term observation, LA MORT DU DIEU SERPENT depicts what can happen after deportation.

#Identity/Life Crisis, #Human Rights/Migration, #Gender/Emancipation, #Africa

OUR TERRIBLE COUNTRY – BALADNA ALRAHEEB (Lebanon, Syrian Arab Republic 2014, Mohammad Ali Atassi, Ziad Homsi). The prominent intellectual, Saleh, and a young photographer fight for revolution in Syria, each in their own individual way, and, in doing so, descend deeper and deeper into existential crisis. In exile in Istanbul, they are safe, while their relatives are in mortal danger and their land in ruins.

#Middle East/Arabic World, #Human Rights/Migration

THE STORM MAKERS (Cambodia, France 2014, Guillaume Suon). Sold as a servant and exploited as a prostitute. In Cambodia human trafficking is thriving. Alongside the fate of a young woman, who returns home traumatised, the film also sheds light on the perpetrators.

#Human Rights/Migration, #Asia

Student Award

POEMA DEL DIA – POEM OF THE DAY (Germany 2015, Youdid Kahveci). In a poor area of Medellín, Columbia, 12 year-old Kevin sells poems and reads them aloud. He doesn’t feel comfortable at home and that is why he often escapes to visit a friend, Amelia, an old woman who wears a cap and lives in a small house on the hillside. There she talks about her life, her family and her dreams. He reads her her letters. But life is not always so simple: Amelia has money troubles.

#Latin America, #Human Rights/Migration

ZELIM'S CONFESSION (Germany 2013, Natalia Mikhaylova). At a bus stop in Ingushetia, Zelim is arrested by the police. He is accused of assaulting someone, or at least he is supposed to admit that he intended to. Five years in prison follow. Zelim won’t admit to something he hasn’t done. Today Zelim is a refugee in Oslo. His family is threatened because they have filed a suit against the police. A story of corruption and the business of terrorism.

#Human Rights/Migration

Retrospective DOK.network Africa

Z32 (France, Israel 2008, Avi Mograbi). An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. After six Israel soldiers were shot, an IDF soldier killed two innocent Palestinians. Mograbi’s “documentary musical tragedy“ poses aesthetically innovative and challenging questions about being a witness and being unable to speak out.

#Politics/Social Conflicts, #Middle East/Arabic World, #Human Rights/Migration

DOK.panorama

DRONE (Norway 2014, Tonje Hessen Schei). In a barrack in the USA, young men sit with joysticks and kill people. On the other side of the world the young and the old, men and women are dying. DRONE is an impressive document that speaks out against drone and robot wars that have already become part of our everyday lives.

#Politics/Social Conflicts, #Human Rights/Migration

12

Our technical partners:

  • Logo Sponsor
  • Logo Sponsor