Documentary Film and Discussion
A Visit from the Duisburg Film Week
June 6 to 8, 2024
The Duisburg Film Week is one of the most important documentary film festivals in the German-speaking world. It is home to a unique discussion culture: Each screening is followed by a panel talk whose minutes are recorded. Austrian director Michael Glawogger once succinctly put it: "When I visited Duisburg, I always had the impression the discussions were the real work of art." After our initial invitation fell victim to the pandemic in 2020, the Film Museum is happy to host festival director Alexander Scholz and members of his team who will present a program combining recent Duisburg premieres along with classics and re-discoveries, and invite the audience to a post-screening discussion with the directors.
Alexander Scholz: "The Duisburg Film Week cross-reads the history of documentary filmmaking. In its visit to the Austrian Film Museum, the festival will show people and patterns – and images, that deny their congruency. Arranged into three pairs of new and old contributions, the six films cut across the festival's history and allow the images to open up new, surprising perspectives.
On view will be glimpses of labor, false perspectives, views of history: women who in 1978 learn so-called "men's professions" and, in 2023, hand movements that mix memories of weaving, swiping, and scrolling. Filmmakers who in the Amazon in the mid-1980s or today in Mexico wanted to film the alleged other and were thrown back onto images of themselves. Jobs devoted – from different distances – to East Germany's interrupted eternity, which understand the process of remembering as open-ended research. These are films that leave behind well-trodden paths of representation, that invite their viewers to see things differently.
The Duisburg Film Week is the festival for documentaries from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (November 4 to 10, 2024). It is known for its concentrated format and ongoing pursuit of a discursive film history. Without competing screenings, audiences in Duisburg participate each November in a week of viewing experiences and arguments: After every film, the cinema turns into a room for discussion to talk with the filmmakers about images and realities, and sometimes to fight. Since 1978, these conversations result in essayistic logs of the talks, recordings published on protokult.de.
Observe, intervene, reflect: This film series pursues the power of the documentary form and the shared aspiration of the Film Museum and the Film Week to build new dialogues using archival images and discourses."
The Duisburg Film Week is one of the most important documentary film festivals in the German-speaking world. It is home to a unique discussion culture: Each screening is followed by a panel talk whose minutes are recorded. Austrian director Michael Glawogger once succinctly put it: "When I visited Duisburg, I always had the impression the discussions were the real work of art." After our initial invitation fell victim to the pandemic in 2020, the Film Museum is happy to host festival director Alexander Scholz and members of his team who will present a program combining recent Duisburg premieres along with classics and re-discoveries, and invite the audience to a post-screening discussion with the directors.
Alexander Scholz: "The Duisburg Film Week cross-reads the history of documentary filmmaking. In its visit to the Austrian Film Museum, the festival will show people and patterns – and images, that deny their congruency. Arranged into three pairs of new and old contributions, the six films cut across the festival's history and allow the images to open up new, surprising perspectives.
On view will be glimpses of labor, false perspectives, views of history: women who in 1978 learn so-called "men's professions" and, in 2023, hand movements that mix memories of weaving, swiping, and scrolling. Filmmakers who in the Amazon in the mid-1980s or today in Mexico wanted to film the alleged other and were thrown back onto images of themselves. Jobs devoted – from different distances – to East Germany's interrupted eternity, which understand the process of remembering as open-ended research. These are films that leave behind well-trodden paths of representation, that invite their viewers to see things differently.
The Duisburg Film Week is the festival for documentaries from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (November 4 to 10, 2024). It is known for its concentrated format and ongoing pursuit of a discursive film history. Without competing screenings, audiences in Duisburg participate each November in a week of viewing experiences and arguments: After every film, the cinema turns into a room for discussion to talk with the filmmakers about images and realities, and sometimes to fight. Since 1978, these conversations result in essayistic logs of the talks, recordings published on protokult.de.
Observe, intervene, reflect: This film series pursues the power of the documentary form and the shared aspiration of the Film Museum and the Film Week to build new dialogues using archival images and discourses."
Link Duisburger Filmwoche
For each series, films are listed in screening order.
