Tracing Light Captivates Audiences and Critics Alike at DOK Leipzig
- TRACING LIGHT
- 04/11/2024
- READING TIME: 3'
"Light as you've never seen before" (Cineuropa). Thomas Riedelsheimer's Tracing Light has had impressive reviews since its premiere. The documentary film brings artists and physicists together to explore the nature and character of light. Its first public viewing was as the opening film of the 2024 International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film (DOK Leipzig) in Germany.
Christoph Terhechte who is DOK Leipzig festival director noted that “Thomas Riedelsheimer’s documentaries are a delightful celebration of light and sound. They sharpen our senses.”
As Amber Wilkinson summarises in Screen International: “… in approaching the subject from both a scientific angle and an artistic one, Riedelsheimer finds the sweet spot between knowledge and beauty.”
In a piece for The Film Verdict, Carmen Gray refers to the film as a “densely packed doc celebrating the elusive nature of light as a medium”; adding that “The documentary is not overly weighed down by the nerdily didactic, because as soon as we may start to feel like we are back in a school lab, glints of surrealism courtesy of the sheer mind-bending quality of quantum physics buoy the dialogues again”.
Light isn’t just a beautiful phenomenon. It’s the language of the universe. It holds all the information about everything from all times within it.
The world sales rights of the film was acquired by New Docs. Speaking on the decision, Elina Kewitz, CEO of New Docs said “We truly believe that this film is for the big screen. We have always admired Thomas Riedelsheimer’s very special vision of culture and the arts as intrinsically humanistic while at the same time able to reveal something new about the world we live in”.
As Savina Petkova of Cineuropa puts it, Tracing Light “lingers on the (frankly entertaining) potential for collaboration between science and art, and the encounters this engenders… Like the patterns of light captured by the filmmaker on his own wall, and those which are an artist’s direct medium, the film is both elusive and concrete, and this duality certainly arouses curiosity”.
Similarly, the review on Screen Scot notes that “Thomas Riedelsheimer’s images, in combination with the encounters between artists and scientists, aim to open up a space for mystery. This is where the magic and the sensuality of his film begins.”
