Documentary Film Award for “Peak”: The Mountain Weeps
Alpine problem zone: Scene from “Peak” (Photo: Unafilm)
24 October 2011
It is the story of paradise lost that director Hannes Lang tells in Peak. Paradise is the South Tyrolean Alps. For his description of their condition, Lang now received the Goethe-Institut’s documentary film award. But, this year the institute didn’t want to leave it at that.
The mountain beckons. It may not be aware of this, but it is certainly the case from the viewpoint of all of those who annually respond to its reputed beckoning and flock to the winter paradise of the South Tyrolean Alps. Yet, those hundred of thousands also leave behind marks in the impressive mountain landscape and those marks are not always pretty ones.
Director Hannes Lang made the destruction of nature and a homeland the subject of his documentary film Peak. The native South Tyrolean created a sober and often sobering appraisal of the Alp region and was so convincing that the jury of the Goethe-Institut’s documentary film award named him this year’s winner.
“The film is distinguished by an overwhelming visual language, which finds appropriate aesthetic expression in the Cinemascope format,” the jury explains its decision. “The universal theme of the destruction of nature by humans is impressively conveyed to the viewer in an exemplary way. The film is able to show this without any commentaries, solely through the images of industrial encroachment in a centuries-old cultural landscape. Systematic destruction of nature in the Alp region and the loss of a homeland radically breach the genre expectations of the traditional Heimatfilm.”
The award, granted during the Leipzig documentary film festival DOK, brings the awardee more, however, than honour and prize money of 2,000 euros. The Goethe-Institut will obtain the licenses and make the documentary film accessible to an audience around the world by funding subtitles in up to ten languages and worldwide screenings.
The jury of the Goethe-Institut chose the awardee from one of the twelve recent documentary films running in the German Competition of the Leipzig festival. Due to the high quality of the competing films, the jury, under director Julia Albrecht as its chair, found this year’s decision a particularly difficult one to make. Therefore the Goethe-Institut decided to also obtain the rights for Carte blanche due to its cinematic qualities and the particular significance of the human rights subject matter for the work of the Goethe-Institut. In the film, director Heidi Specogna traces the case of the Congolese militia leader Jean-Pierre Bemba, who is charged in The Hague for murders, looting and rape, and reveals the Sisyphean task of the court.
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