DOK.fest München Podcast. Im Kino. Zuhause.

MAGIC MOUNTAIN, GE, PL 2023, Mariam Chachia, Nik Voigt Pills, card games and cigarettes: this is how the days go by in Abastumani. In a crumbling palatial building high in the Georgian mountains, people who are chronically ill with tuberculosis live in complete isolation – until they find out that their unloved home is to be demolished. In calm and clear images, MAGIC MOUNTAIN tells of a parallel...

Moderation: Daniel Lang SHE CHEF, AT, DE 2022, Melanie Liebheit, Gereon Wetzel Agnes' years as a young chef in Europe's Michelin-starred restaurants are instructive: she convinces the head chefs with her ability, but the pressure is enormous. Can Agnes stand her ground in this male-dominated world? Her self-declared goal is to be the boss in her own restaurant. The directors get right up c...

Moderation: Daniel Lang DEMON MINERAL, US 2023 – Director: Hadley Austin On the territory of the Navajo Nation in USA, disused uranium mines pose an on-going threat to the environment of the indigenous people. Their efforts to reclaim their sacred earth and gain compensation are unfailing. Here the indigenous community of activists, artists and scientists have their say. A film manifesto that is i...

#RACEGIRL – DAS COMEBACK DER SOPHIA FLÖRSCH, DE 2023,Sonia Otto Editing: Finbarr Wilbrink, Karoline Schulz Since she was four years old, Sophia Flörsch has trained to fulfil her life’s dream – to be a Formula 1 racing driver. And she is good. Really good in fact. But what does that mean in an industry fixated on men, where only drivers whose families can provide them with start-up capital have a c...

Moderation: Seggen Mikael KOKOMO CITY, US 2023, D. Smith Four black trans sex workers speak about their backgrounds and their everyday lives in New York and Atlanta. Their deeply honest stories expose the clichés and taboos in discussions of transsexuality. In striking black and white images and underscored with a Blaxploitation soundtrack, interviews, dramatizations and re-enactments come togethe...

Moderation: Eva Weinmann BE WATER – VOICES FROM HONG KONG, DE 2023, Lia Erbal ⁠Umbrella protests in Hong Kong: we hear the voices of people caught between hope for change and brutal repression⁠. Nathan Law  is a young political activist that has been leading the Hong Kong democracy movement. Beginning from the Umbrella Movement in 2014 where he participated as a student leader, he was there on eve...

Moderation: Christina Wolf THE LAST SEAGULL, BG, FI, NO 2023, Tonislav Hristov For the past 40 years, Ivan has been an escort on Sunny Beach in Bulgaria. He is getting tired and wants to retire and re-establish contact with his son in Kyiv. This is no easy undertaking because of the pandemic and his lack of savings. What’s more, the wealthy Russian women are hard to convince. A sentimental portrai...

Moderation: Vera Drude BE WATER – VOICES FROM HONG KONG, DE 2023, Lia Erbal The fight for democracy in Hong Kong has long been a battle of systems, as well as a brutal game of economic dependencies. With a collage of found footage, interviews with experts and sketches of the thoughts of young activists, the filmmaker paints a picture of a city between wild hope for change and resignation to the Ch...

Moderation: Julia Teichmann INNOCENCE, DK, FI, IS, IR 2022, Guy Davidi Even the youngest are meant to learn to love the army. In Israel, military service is part of every young person’s experience from the age of 18. Those who refuse to take part, have to reckon with hostility and lack of understanding while many are torn apart by doubt. A powerful plea for self-determination and a warning against...

Moderation: Julia Teichmann WIR UND DAS TIER – EIN SCHLACHTHAUSMELODRAM, DE 2023, David Spaeth Many people have become completely disconnected with the process of killing in which meat production originates. What does it mean for the people whose job it is to slaughter? And what impact does it have on us to face up to it? There are no ready-made answers. That is what we learn from this intelligent...

Moderation: Ludwig Kramer LA EMPRESA, DE 2023, André Siegers In search of a story, a German film crew ends up in El Alberto, Mexico. The village has become famous for the Caminata Nocturna – an attraction that re-enacts illegal border crossings to the USA and is based on the experiences of the locals. This keenly nuanced essay film grapples with the possibilities and limits of cinematic representa...

Moderation: Ina Bormann WIR WAREN KUMPEL, DEE, CH 2023, Christian Johannes Koch, Jonas Matauschek In 2018, anthracite mining comes to an end in Germany. Generations of miners have known nothing but shift work underground and coal dust on their skin and under their fingernails. Now this era is ending and a new one is dawning. The film accompanies five miners as they cross the threshold into the unk...

Moderation: Max Weigl PARADISE, FR, CH 2022, Alexander Abaturov Ash clouds darken the skies over the East Siberian taiga. The sparsely populated land is ravaged by violent forest fires in summer 2021. While great swathes of the subarctic forests are in flames, the population of the barren region must protect itself from the threat. They cannot expect help from the Russian authorities.  Biography A...

NON-ALIGNED: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIĆ REELS HR, FR, ME, QT, RS 2022, Mila Turajlić Cameraman Stevan Labudović followed Yugoslavia’s President Tito on his transcontinental search for new allies during the cold war. Decades later, the director discovers the film footage created back then in a Belgrade film archive and turns it into a fascinating and touching account of an almost forgotten mission a...

Moderation: Ina Bormann EIGENTLICH EIGENTLICH JANUAR, DE 2022, Jan Peters Turn on the camera and go for it. Or is it finely planned? 3-minute reels of exposed film material. Textured flickering images. A train of thought without pause for breath. Whispering that breaks off at an inopportune moment. Collected photos, rearranged, relate simple everyday and major political matters – and it’s the imag...

Moderation: Pablo Bücheler DREAMING ARIZONA, DK, EE, NO 2022 Winslow, a small town in Arizona, is surrounded by nothing but desert, highways and railway lines. The pupils in the local high school want to escape the misery of their hometown by putting on a self-written theatre play. The director Jon Bang Carlson follows their rehearsals and captures the dreams and worries of the young people in ima...

Moderation: Elena Álvarez-Lutz ) HYPERMOON, SE 2023, Mia Engberg “This day is forever going to divide time into a before and an after.” When Mia Engberg receives a devastating diagnosis, she has to call off the shoot she has planned for her new film. Instead she rummages deep into the archive of her filmed life and takes us on an extremely personal, touching journey between hospital visits, her me...

Moderation: Pablo Bücheler ZONA NORTE MX 2022, Javier Ávila The homeless people on the streets of Tijuana belong neither in the USA nor Mexico. Without the right to exist, they turn to the needle and prop themselves up with crystal meth. Their bodies are broken and riddled with disease. The film draws an intimate portrait of people living in one of the most violent cities in the world whose goal i...

THE VISITORS CZ, NO, SL 2022, Veronika Lišková Film talk with director Veronika Lišková, protagonist Zdenka Sokolickova, visual anthropologist Flora Bartlett and Prof. Christoph Mauch, Director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich. A paradise of ice and snow. Ever since Zdenka, a young anthropologist, moved to Svalbard, she has been fascinated by the wild beauty of...

Moderation: Daniel Lang CLOSE TO VERMEER, NL 2023, Suzanne Raes What makes a true Jan Vermeer? Gregor Weber, a renowned Vermeer expert, is curating the biggest exhibition ever of the most famous Dutch Baroque painter at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Visiting international museums and art experts, he gradually assembles the paintings. A very personal and intimate look at the artist and the question...

Moderation: Daniel Lang BODIES AND STRUGGLES, BE 2022 , Christophe Hermans Shortly after the first wave of coronavirus, the second looms over the hospital in the Belgian city of Liège in late 2020. There is a shortage of beds and staff and the workers are also fighting on another front: many people outside the clinics are beginning to deny the danger of Covid-19. Insights into working lives stretc...

Moderation: Daniel Lang AND THE KING SAID, WHAT A FANTASTIC MACHINE, SE 2022, Axel Danielson, Maximilien van Aertryck "The camera records what is in front of it. What do we do with this possibility?" The first photograph was taken in 1826 - almost two hundred years later, over 300 million photos are now produced every day and are available anytime, anywhere. We live in an age of mass com...

Moderation: Elena Álvarez-Lutz A BUMP IN THE HEART, BE 2022, Noé Reutenauer How do you find a girlfriend – someone to love, a princess that you can pamper and adore? Kirill is in his mid thirties and is seeking independence and above all, true love. But it’s not so simple for this young man with Down syndrome who would prefer not to admit that he hasn’t had much experience yet in affairs of the he...

Moderation: Maren Willkomm DEMON MINERAL, US 2023 – Director: Hadley Austin On the territory of the Navajo Nation in USA, disused uranium mines pose an on-going threat to the environment of the indigenous people. Their efforts to reclaim their sacred earth and gain compensation are unfailing. Here the indigenous community of activists, artists and scientists have their say. A film manifesto that i...

Moderation: Florian Schwarz DUSTY & STONES, Eswatini, US 2022, Jesse Rudoy “Dusty” and “Stones” are musicians who love the sentimentality of country music. They play passionate concerts in their home country, known today as the African Kingdom of Eswatini. When they are nominated to take part in a Texas country music competition, they set out on a journey that takes them first to Nashville bef...