DOK Leipzig is an annual festival highlighting documentaries and animations that spark debate. The goal of the festival is to showcase the values of peace, tolerance, human dignity and freedom of expression that films can convey, alongside the strong, individual artistic signature of the filmmakers.
In its 65th edition, the festival gathered around 40,000 visitors to Leipzig, Germany, across numerous cinemas and venues that take part in the film screenings, talks, and special events. Every year, the Inter-Religious Jury, appointed by SIGNIS and INTERFILM, is present at the festival to give their award. This year, the winning film is Une vie comme une autre (A Life Like Any Other) directed by Faustine Cros (Belgium, France, 2022).
The film represents the portrait of a woman at odds with her role as a mother and its demands, and it’s impressively edited by her now adult daughter from material accumulated over more than thirty years. For the Jury, “A Life Like Any Other is a soulful and subtle movie about feminism where intimacy never disturbs the message, where the eye and the heart of the daughter never dominate the vision of the director. The movie deconstructs with virtuosity the seeming idyll of a family, and how it is presented to us in old family video footage through old family films and photos and recent interviews. The director makes visible the often overseen and disturbing reality of traditional motherhood”.
The prize from the Inter-Religious Jury is endowed with € 1,750, jointly donated by the Interreligious Round Table Leipzig, the Oratorium zu Leipzig and the VCH-Hotels Deutschland GmbH – im Verband Christlicher Hoteliers e. V. including the Hotel MICHAELIS Leipzig.
This year’s Inter-Religious Jury was composed of Karin Becker (Germany) Jihane Bougrine (Morocco), Nicola Galliner (Germany) and Jacques Champeaux (France) as President of the Jury.