A Letter to Uncle Boonmee
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Thailand 2009, 18 min, Beta SP, colour

Statement:
For creating a cinematographic idiom that transcends conventional documentary realism or its representation. For evolving a temporality that is unhurried and reflexive and yet deeply disturbing as it references the brutalities of army and war through re-imagining the village of Nabua.

Ketamin – Hinter dem Licht
(Ketamin – Behind the Light)
Carsten Aschmann
Germany 2009, 21 min, Beta SP, colour

Statement:
When the shadows of cinema invite us to go on a journey behind the light, the sounds of chords, beauty, art and probably death echo through the abstraction of the film form, like in Ketamin – Hinter dem Licht.

True Story
Robert Frank
USA 2004/2008, 26 min, DV, colour and bw

Statement:
An unending family catastrophe provides an epicentre of loss for the aging artist who, after a lifetime of raw picture wounds, demonstrates a deep tenderness, a living ethics with partner and artist June Leaf.

Bernadette
Duncan Campbell
Great Britain 2008, 37 min, DV, colour and bw

Statement:
Bernadette Devlin’s extraordinary political conviction is captured in TV coverage that documented Northern Ireland’s barricaded city of Derry and the Bloody Sunday of 30 January 1972. Devlin’s own imprisonment for her attack in Parliament on the British Home Secretary is an achievement of her radical activist role. Duncan Campbell frames Bernadette’s story with uncomfortable “white spaces” which reflect on the dissolution of her parameters as the divided country eventually becomes the divided self.

Nora
Alla Kovgan und David Hinton
USA 2009, 36 min, Beta SP, colour

Statement:
For its delirious chromatics and a continual metamorphosis from dance deliriums, intertitled diary moments, gender bending choreography and village vignettes, a surprising turn after turn.