DOK Leipzig, the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, is proud to become the world’s first festival to award a prize for best animated documentary starting this year. The 3,000-euro Golden Dove will go to a film that combines elements of documentary and animated film in an imaginative, creative and artistically independent way and thereby creates a new cinematic quality.
The prize builds on the heritage and mission of DOK Leipzig, which since its founding in 1955 has been the world’s only film festival committed to showcasing both documentaries and animated films. For the past 17 years DOK Leipzig has given the hybrid film form its own platform with the Animadoc section, and has also dedicated a number of special programmes to it. In addition, animated documentaries have been an integral part of both the documentary and animated film competitions for years, and have already won a number of awards: The 2009 Golden Dove for Best Short Documentary went to TYING YOUR OWN SHOES by Shira Avni and the 2012 award for Best Animated Film to FATHER by Ivan Bogdanov, Moritz Mayerhofer, Veljko Popovic, Asparuh Petrov, Rositsa Raleva and Dmitry Yagodin. For years, DOK Leipzig has also offered a series of events on the animated documentary and created networking opportunities for representatives of both industries as part of the industry offering ANIMA MEETS DOC introduced in 2011.
Nominees for the new Golden Dove will be chosen from the Selection Committee’s official selection of film entries for animated and documentary film, so they may be featured cross-sectionally in one of the five competitions as well as in the International or Animadoc programme. The winner will be selected by a jury of representatives of both genres.
In DOK Leipzig’s view, Animadoc films are not just animated documentaries in the traditional sense, but reflect a playful use of cinematic forms. This is underscored by a series of films that will provide programmatic accompaniment to the introduction of the new prize this year:
This programme ventures to the beginning of the hybrid genre, when directors around Alberto Cavalcanti (one of the founding fathers of DOK Leipzig) and Norman McLaren realized their films in the film departments of the General Post Office and, later, of the National Film Board of Canada. With disregard to genre boundaries and definitions, but with great artistic freedom and expressivity, they experimented there with elements of documentary and animated film.
In that spirit, DOK Leipzig sees the Golden Dove for animated documentary as a further step to an understanding of documentary and animated film as art forms beyond matters of format and media currents.
Film submissions for the 56th edition of DOK Leipzig can still be made until July 10, 2013, via the website www.dok-leipzig.de.
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