A Visit from the Duisburg Film Week
50 Years of the Present: Celebrating the Anniversary of the Duisburg Film Week
June 11 and 13, 2026
For the third time in a row, the Duisburg Film Week brings a program to the Austrian Film Museum, and this time marks the festival's 50th anniversary. Six programs will present works from throughout the history of the festival, which was and remains a formative event for documentary filmmakers in the German-speaking world. The films in this year's selection plumb the relationships between material and history, media and contemporaneity. Many of the screenings will be followed by an intense discussion between the filmmakers and the audience. On view will be a few film reels and video tapes, found and lost images, forbidden and seemingly accidental footage, and make-up routines garnished with emojis. Film grain dances on faces, the sound is drowned out by the woosh of the surrounding wind, a digital glitch conceals disclosed realities. It is not always easy to recover (hi)story and the present from the footage. Documentary is also about an excess of images which possibly wanted to tell something entirely different. It is the reading filmmakers give to the footage they shoot or find, steep themselves in and edit. It is what the viewers themselves discover in the footage. Sometimes with mischievous pleasure, sometimes with political furor, the selected works move along invisible and real borders between home and journey, anti-homeland and lostness, migration and tourism, Russian enclaves and the eternal ice. Footage and form consistently comment on the possibilities of dragging that which is suppressed in images and society into the light of the present. (Patrick Holzapfel / Translation: Ted Fendt)
For the third time in a row, the Duisburg Film Week brings a program to the Austrian Film Museum, and this time marks the festival's 50th anniversary. Six programs will present works from throughout the history of the festival, which was and remains a formative event for documentary filmmakers in the German-speaking world. The films in this year's selection plumb the relationships between material and history, media and contemporaneity. Many of the screenings will be followed by an intense discussion between the filmmakers and the audience. On view will be a few film reels and video tapes, found and lost images, forbidden and seemingly accidental footage, and make-up routines garnished with emojis. Film grain dances on faces, the sound is drowned out by the woosh of the surrounding wind, a digital glitch conceals disclosed realities. It is not always easy to recover (hi)story and the present from the footage. Documentary is also about an excess of images which possibly wanted to tell something entirely different. It is the reading filmmakers give to the footage they shoot or find, steep themselves in and edit. It is what the viewers themselves discover in the footage. Sometimes with mischievous pleasure, sometimes with political furor, the selected works move along invisible and real borders between home and journey, anti-homeland and lostness, migration and tourism, Russian enclaves and the eternal ice. Footage and form consistently comment on the possibilities of dragging that which is suppressed in images and society into the light of the present. (Patrick Holzapfel / Translation: Ted Fendt)
Link Duisburger Filmwoche