Dhe phone from Putin. Daniel Sponsel draws the attention of the audience, who are easily tired from long speeches of thanks, to a fresh photo of the Kremlin boss and his clearly visible telephone system. An oversized landline device, the likes of which were last seen twenty years ago. “Putin’s phone doesn’t look very contemporary. I hope that’s not the red phone. . .”, jokes the festival director of Germany’s largest documentary film festival, the Munich Dok.fest, which is to open a few minutes later with the film “Navalnyj”, which was enthusiastically acclaimed in the packed Deutsches Theater. Sponsel explains self-confidently: “The documentary film is a premier class of culture.” Many viewers have been convinced of this in the past two years of the pandemic.
Adele Kohout, the deputy director of the festival, explains that the paradox was that more viewers visited the Dok.fest online in those two years than ever before in its thirty-seven-year history. This gives rise to the responsibility of making it possible for people who cannot be there in person to participate in the festival, at least online.
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