Films from Chile, Canada and Uganda unveiled in diverse DOK Leipzig 2025 lineup

Five world premieres are among the nine films selected for the international competition at this year’s DOK Leipzig, taking place in Germany from October 27- November 2.

They include: Chilean director Meliza Luna Venegas’ Green Desert about a former natural paradise threatened by forest fires: Canadian filmmaker Serge-Olivier Rondeau’s The Inheritors a profile of the ring-billed seagull that lives on a Montreal landfill site; and Swiss filmmaker Gregor Brändli’s Elephants & Squirrels about the odyssey on which a Sri Lankan artist embarked to return works of art from Switzerland to her home country.

The competition also features the international premieres of Austria’s Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Melt celebrating a transient beauty of melting ice and snow from around the globe, Croatian Ivan Ramljak’s Peacemaker, a tribute to a murdered police chief’s efforts to achieve peace in Slavonia in 1991, and Vancouver-based Jennifer Chiu’s Clan Of The Painted Lady, which traces the footsteps of the filmmaker’s Hakka ancestors from China via Canada to India.

The five features selected for the international animated film competition include Italian director Giovanni Columbu’s Balentes which uses brush drawings to tell the story of two friends liberating a herd of horses from a military stud farm at the beginning of the Second World War, and self-taught Mexican filmmaker Aria Covamonas’ homage to Dadaist art in the cut-out animation of The Great History Of Western Philosophy, which features appearances by characters as diverse as Plato, Nietzsche and Mickey Mouse.

Seven of the eight feature documentaries screening in the German competition are world premieres in Leipzig. 

They include: Kampala-based filmmaker Patience Nitumwesiga’s debut feature documentary The Woman Who Poked The Leopard, about the iconic Ugandan feminist Stella Nyanzi who spent years using provocative means to oppose incumbent head of state Yoweri Museveni; Russian-born director Yulia Lokshina’s Active Vocabulary, which examines how the Russian state uses schools to further its own agenda following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022; and Germany filmmaker Victor Graf’s Nonna, a portrait of his grandmother living alone in her house in southern Italy far away from the rest of her family in Germany.

The fourth competition section, the audience competition, offers a showcase for 10 feature-length films that have been shown at other major international film festivals during the year, including Karlovy Vary (Miro Remo’s Better Go Mad in the Wild), Cannes (Namir Abdel Messeeh’s Life After Siham) and Sundance (Amber Fares’ Coexistence, My Ass! and Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks).

This year’s DOK Leipzig will be the last edition under the leadership of festival director Christoph Terhechte. It opens with the international premiere of Claire Simon’s Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students.

“Most of the films sent to us in the post-pandemic period have dealt with family situations and inner thoughts,” said Terhechte of the submissions the festival has received. “This year, however, numerous documentaries and animated films have returned to looking outward. They address the threat of environmental destruction, resistance to political violence, the fight against exploitation, and strategies for human resilience under extreme circumstances.”

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