United in a single program at DAFilms, filmmakers Claire Simon and Lee Anne Schmitt were the subjects of dual retrospectives at this year’s edition of DOK Leipzig.
Claire Simon has cultivated a cinematic practice through an unrelenting commitment to certain principles of documentary form, crafting observational non-fiction portraits grounded in the rhythms of everyday life. Throughout her work, Simon has rendered public spaces - railway stations, parks, towns - not merely as settings but as living, breathing participants in an unfolding natural drama.
By contrast, Schmitt’s films inhabit a porous territory between documentary and essay film. Traversing landscapes marked by migration or conflict, her observational lens becomes an instrument of reckoning, a method for tracing the hidden pathways of history etched on the landscapes of the United States. Schmitt’s work offers forms of testimony attuned to both fragility and resistance, reframing landscapes as sites of interrogation and reflection.
“Documenting is not recording,” Claire Simon insisted at her recent masterclass in Leipzig, “it’s looking and listening until life writes itself.”
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