_{Love is Not an Orange by Otilia Babara}

Love is Not an Orange*, directed by Otilia Babara and co-produced by Basalt Film, celebrates its world premiere at Dok Leipzig. It is selected for the Panorama Middle and Eastern Europe sections. This documentary tells the story of how a group of Moldovian girls growing up in the 1990s encountered a crossroads in history after their country discovered independence.

Co-produced by Submarine, animation Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish* by Lei Lei, screens in Germany for the first time as part of the Competition for the Audience Award. Amid China’s tumultuous political movements of the 1950’s and 60’s, the Lei family struggles to survive. Political authorities become gods in the heavens, and the masses strive to show their commitment, as fantasy and realism blend together in this personal vision of history. Sales are handled by Asian Shadows.

World premiering in the Competition for the Audience Award Short Film, On Taphonomy by Ana Maria Gómez López is a short essay is dedicated to the pioneer of taphonomy, Johannes Weigelt. Three image fields are filled with changing content: black and white documents of fields of animal carcasses, a snapshot with Göring, text panels, artful photomontages. They all charge one another, containing a vibrantly shimmering biography fossilised in images.

Short documentary Why My Mum Loves Russell Crowe by Emma van den Berg has its international premiere in the International Competition for Best Short Film. “Sex does strange things to people!” This sentence reverberates from the director's childhood. What did her mother mean? What fears did she pass on to her? The budding filmmaker sets up the camera in her mother’s apartment, invites mum’s friends, creates an open atmosphere. Coby (Emma's mother) opens up more and more, talks about a repressed topic. At the same time, she gets to show a wholly different side of herself, performing song and dance numbers in front of her daughter’s lens.

Indonesian feature-length documentary Tropic Fever by Mahardika Yudha, Robin Hartanto Honggare and Perdana Roswaldy celebrates its world premiere in the International Competition. Made with archival material from Het Nieuwe Instituut, Eye Film Museum and Marinus Plantema Foundation, Tropic Fever is a semi-autobiographical account of a European plantation manager on Sumatra during Dutch colonial rule and is a starting point for reflections on the structure of the plantation itself. An essay about local tobacco and rubber cultivation, the construction of skin colour as a social category and the "tropic fever” which rises slowly but inexorably, edited from archive material dating from 1890 to 1930.

For more information on DOK Leipzig, click here.
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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund