It is one of the assets of this festival that, unlike comparable events, it keeps reflecting its own positions with a surprising degree of self-criticism and on a very high level.
Rüdiger Suchsland, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 May 2009

Oberhausen has long become a brand, one that stands for high artistic quality, a cultural mission and constant discourse about the short form on film. The festival never seems to rest on its achievements, questioning its aesthetics and concepts, standards and duties all the time.
Oliver Baumgarten, Blickpunkt:Film, No. 21+22/2009

Oberhausen is anything but a complaisant festival. Austerity, the rejection of all-too-neat solutions and emotional manipulations, an enigmatic quality and the negation of all expectations, including those of industry visitors, are positive values here, and this deserves nothing but praise.
Dieter Wieczorek, schnitt.com, May 2009

The 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen confronted the films so precisely with each other and initiated dialogues between genres and topics so cleverly that the composition of the programmes alone would have been worth an award this year.
Kristina Tieke, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 May 2009

Even while festival director Lars Henrik Gass is as yet unable to estimate the financial losses in sponsoring, discussions about a general cancellation of this traditional festival, triggered by the municipal budget freeze, sprang up in other places. This would be a shame, since the festival is presenting itself in its 55th edition as a cultural ambassador par excellence.
Martin Boldt, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 5 May 2009

Long a destination for filmmakers to showcase their work, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen has expanded its program in recent years to incorporate experimental film and video art. … I finally had the chance to see Matsumoto Toshio’s work in a theatre for the first time during the festival, after only viewing his films through UbuWeb. Sound is a central component to his films, something the theatre setting brought out for me in a major way.
Ceci Moss, rhizome.org, 13 May 2009

The 55th edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen has just ended; an event with a long history, which has energetically resisted decline by adapting itself to the countless newly founded similar festivals on the one hand and to the rapid development of technologies, not just in the production but also in the distribution and projection, of artist film and videos.
Montse Badia, www.a-desk.org, Spain, 9 May 2009

Lars Henrik Gass, the head of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, takes a more radical stance than his colleagues in “Schnitt”. Because films earn less and less profit in the cinemas and more and more on DVD and through digital channels, “film as a commodity does not need festivals any more, perhaps not even cinemas”. This did not necessarily mean the ruin of film festivals. On the contrary, it was “a historic chance to show better films at last”.
Der Spiegel, 11 May 2009

In addition, festival director Lars Henrik Gass had cut the programmes to 80 minutes, which left enough time to discover the variety of the short form in the excellently curated theme programmes: for example in the ten-part programme “Unreal Asia”.
Gabrielle Schultz, Die Welt, 8 May 2009

Two more of Weerasethakul’s short films were screened in the “Unreal Asia” theme programme, which presented the wealth of South East Asian cinematic languages, especially those beyond the big three – China, Korea, Japan: an extraordinarily rich and breathtakingly exciting compilation of 71 representative works.
Rüdiger Suchsland, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 May 2009

Over the past few years, Asia has become the focus of film festivals and the art world. The Oberhausen Short Film Festival, which lately managed to re-position itself at the intersection between those two worlds, responded to the wealth of short and medium-length works, shot primarily on video and offering the chance to compile a complex image of the developments in the Far East, with “Unreal Asia”.
Bert Rebhandl, Der Standard, Austria, 6 May 2009

Unreal Asia is the latest in a range of thematic programmes that distinguish Oberhausen from many festivals which rarely commit on this scale to such wide ranging thematic explorations. In recent years programmes have explored the parallels between European and American experimental film and their counterparts in the Soviet Union, looked at the middle east through the prism of Lebanon and reflections on successive conflicts and the relation of the cinema to the museum in the influential programme Kinomuseum. Unreal Asia proposed a similarly fascinating series of questions and proposals while also crucially presenting a wide range of work that is rarely if ever shown outside of the countries of origin.
George Clark, animateprojects.blogspot.com, Great Britain, 11 May 2009

It can be no coincidence that the boldest hybrids in cinematic narratives come from there [Asia]; narratives that move between the lines of documentary and fiction as effortlessly as birds used to move across the former borderline between the two Germanys.
Matthias Dell, der Freitag, 7 May 2009

Michel Klöfkorn, a master of visual music, richly deserved the award of the German Competition. The Frankfurt-based animator who became famous with his “Star Escalator” garage door clip for Sensorama animated a completely immobile object this time: the anti pigeon spikes that are mounted on ledges to keep pigeons away… Cut to sampled beats, they are not only a tribute to Dadaism, but to the soul behind the objects, the beauty found in ugliness.
Daniel Kothenschulte, Frankfurter Rundschau, 7 May 2009

The new centre of Oberhausen is situated on the edge of town, a closed system under video surveillance. Many of the contributions to the festival wondered how a public can be constructed under such circumstances.
Dietmar Kammerer, die tageszeitung, 7 May 2009

The difference in terms says it all: the Anglo-Saxon “copyright” is a reader’s and viewer’s right, accorded to him or her under certain conditions and limitations. In dubio pro user. The “Urheberrecht” found in the German Civil Code is a creator’s right, protecting his or her work against undesired use. In dubio pro creator.
A discussion at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen showed how hard it is to reconcile these to rights. The title, printed in German and English, already suggested the whole tension of a debate between the euphoria of possibilities and the fear of risks.
Rüdiger Suchsland, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 May 2009

The great interest in music videos at Oberhausen is a fascinating and extraordinary phenomenon, since this special form of short films has been in constant transformation since the decline of music television – and the final result is still completely open.
Oliver Baumgarten, schnitt.com, May 2009

The contributions to the German MuVi Award fitted seamlessly into a visually astounding festival. In the spirit of “music television is dead, long life the music short film”, the Saturday night competition showed twelve short films of the most diverse visual languages.
Michael Schmitz, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 May 2009

This year, the NRZ will again donate the prize for the best film in the children’s programme of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Our paper is very happy to do this. The film festival is famous and exciting every year. And we think that it is a very good idea to show a special programme for kids and to award a prize to the best film.
Rüdiger Oppers, NRZ children’s supplement, „Oberhausen spezial“, May 2009