56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 29 April - 4 May 2010

 

The competitions at the 56th festival

Shorts from all five continents

 

Download this press release as a pdf-file here.

 

For a list of all films selected for the competitions please click here.

 

A total of 145 works from 40 countries will vie for awards worth 40,500 euros at the 56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Five competitions will be held this year: the International Competition, German Competition, NRW Competition, Children’s and Youth Film Competition and the MuVi Award for best German music video. Open to all themes and genres, and for film as well as video formats, Oberhausen’s competitions attract entries covering the full spectrum of the short form today. The nominees have been chosen from 5,418 submissions received from 86 countries.

 

 

International Competition

64 entries from 36 countries (last year 51 entries from 31 countries)

 

In 2010 all five continents are represented in the International Competition. Once again in strong evidence this year are the USA with nine and the United Kingdom with eight titles. With six films, the Netherlands has more nominees than ever before in the International Competition, as does Israel with three works. It is equally pleasing to note two films from Africa on the shortlist, one from Uganda and the other from South Africa. Short works from Kazakhstan, Moldavia, Lebanon and El Salvador give us a glimpse of the cinematic vocabulary of some less prominent filmmaking nations.

 

This year’s International Competition quite literally takes viewers on a virtual trip around the world – from Siberia to South Africa, from Kazakhstan to Thailand, from Iceland to Australia. And the range of themes is as broad as the territory covered. It runs the gamut from a Dutch homage to the old-fashioned dining car in Arianne Olthaar’s Restauratiewagens to a Brazilian cinemascope fiction film about day labourers in Chapa by Thiago Ricarte; from the story of a failed documentary in Andrew Taylor’s Australian production Siberia to the Israeli Performance Promotional Video by the artists’ group Public Movement.

 

All three Israeli productions came out of the art context, reflecting the steady increase in works by artists submitted to the International Competition during the past few years. Apart from Public Movement, Israeli filmmakers Roee Rosen and Yael Bartana are also competing, and artist/filmmakers from other countries also made the cut: Manon de Boer from Belgium, Jaan Toomik from Estonia, Laure Prouvost (GB), Wendelien van Oldenborgh (Netherlands), Ziad Antar (Lebanon), Sun Xun (China) and many more. A few familiar faces are returning to the competition this year – Brazilian filmmaker Eder Santos, Jay Rosenblatt (USA) and John Smith (GB) for example – while young filmmaker Hannaleena Hauru from Finland, who just two years ago made waves with her final exam film, is returning to Oberhausen with two works this year: Catching in the International Competition and with another film in the Children’s and Youth Film Competition.

 

Two entries in the International Competition come from Germany: Jeanne Faust’s Reconstructing Damon Albarn in Kinshasa and Jana Debus’s Zueignung.

 

Jury for the International Competition

Mara Mattuschka, filmmaker (Vienna)

Maria Pallier, television editor (Madrid)

Ellen Pau, curator (Hong Kong)

Adam Pugh, author and curator (Norwich)

Fred Worden, filmmaker (Silver Spring)

 

 

German Competition

28 entries (25 last year)

 

The genres on view in the German Competition are more diverse than ever before, but fiction film clearly dominates. This paradox is explained upon closer inspection by the fact that the fiction works nearly always depart from the classical narrative tradition to experiment in many directions, incorporating elements from experimental and documentary film and dabbling in pictorial vocabularies that are extremely free-flowing in both formal and thematic terms.

 

One example of an experimental genre film, in this case a horror flick with vampire elements, is Ute Ströer’s Schlafende Füchsin. Adnan Softić’s Ground Control starts out as a documentary about the filmmaker’s family, but then turns out to be an invented fiction, calling the conventions of both genres in question. In Reconstructing Damon Albarn in Kinshasa (which is also running in the International Competition), Jeanne Faust sets out to reconstruct a photo of the Blur singer taken in Kinshasa – but instead of a documentary creates a fiction film with experimental aspects.

 

Unlike last year, the documentary-makers in this year’s German Competition tended to find their themes on home ground: from a seismographic station in Bergisch-Gladbach in Lea Hartlaub’s Bensberg September 2009, to Halberstedt for a John Cage organ project in Anca Lazarescus’s Es wird einmal gewesen sein, and onward to Gesang der Jünglinge, where Andree Korpys and Markus Löffler film a group of German police officers testing out a new electroshock device on their own bodies.

 

Among the established names in the competition are Volker Schreiner, Mariola Brillowska, Stanislaw Mucha, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Jochen Kuhn, Jürgen Reble and Ute Aurand. Last year’s winner Michel Klöfkorn is also back again, with the stop-motion animation /…flüssiges papier.

 

Jury for the German Competition

Züli Aladag, filmmaker (Berlin)

Christine Dollhofer, Crossing Europe Filmfestival (Linz)

Gabrielle Schultz, author (Oberhausen/Vienna)

 

 

NRW Competition

7 entries (10 last year)

 

From around 230 titles submitted, Oberhausen has chosen seven to contend for awards valued at 1,500 euros in this year’s NRW Competition, first introduced in 2009. With five productions, fiction film dominates here as well, and two documentaries round out the slate. Filmmakers in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, among them German Film Award winner Rainer Komers, were able to lure prominent actors before the camera, including Hannelore Hoger, Jenny Schily, Wotan Wilke Möhring and Élodie Bouchez from France. Nominated are works from both Cologne film schools – four from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) and one from ifs, the International Film School (a co-production with the University of Applied Arts in Dortmund) – as well as two independent productions.

 

One of the youngest filmmakers in the Oberhausen competitions this year, Angélique Dubois, paint a portrait of Leverkusen as an astoundingly convincing setting for a classic “spaghetti western” in Legenden. Driving Élodie by Lars Henning and starring Élodie Bouchez is the story of the tender relationship between a movie star and her chauffeur, while Rosa Hannah Ziegler’s Frau am Meer with Jenny Schily and Hannelore Hoger in the leading roles recounts the psychological drama of a woman who breaks off all contact with family and friends following a personal crisis. In Bogdana Vera Lorenz’s Heimspiel, Wotan Wilke Möhring leads a double life as a vocational school teacher and hooligan – until he comes face to face with one of his students in a brawl. The comedy Wellenreiter by Markus Mischkowski and Kai Maria Steinkühler from the orbit of Cologne’s legendary Filmclub 813 tackles the economic crisis with dry humour: using the example of the two long-term unemployed buddies Mike and Alfred, it illustrates the so-called “ice cream vendors on the beach” dilemma put forth by economist Harold Hotelling.

 

The two documentary filmmakers in the NRW Competition found their themes in North America: Rainer Komers from Mülheim shows us scenes and impressions from Milltown (the English translation of Mühlheim!), Montana, a city set in the midst of a landscape devastated by mining and industry. In Holding Still Florian Riegel employs photos and found material to sketch the life story of a woman who has been bound to her bed for years – after her husband broke her neck while tripping on LSD.

 

The awards in the NRW Competition are again sponsored this year by the NRW.BANK.

 

Jury of the NRW Competition

Gabi Hinderberger, Blicke aus dem Ruhrgebiet Film Festival (Bochum)

Ute Mader, Kommunales Kino Leverkusen

Dirk Steinkühler, Filmpalette cinema (Cologne)

 

 

The 12th MuVi Award

12 nominated clips (like last year)

 

A new generation is stepping up to the plate to vie for the MuVi Award for best German music video: of the twelve directors nominated, eleven have never before taken part. Only Markus Wambsganss, winner of multiple MuVi awards, has competed in Oberhausen previously. Among the debutantes are some familiar names, however, such as Klaus Lemke, who works in his clip Andere Leute with excerpts from his old films, and Schorsch Kamerun, who is celebrating his MuVi premiere with the clip Positionen for his own band, Die Goldenen Zitronen.

 

As elsewhere, the influence of the art world can be felt keenly in the MuVi Award line-up. For instance, documenta artist Carsten Nicolai is joining the race with his clip u_08-1 (co-directed by Simon Mayer). A few lovingly made animations are also featured this year: a cardboard train stars in Die Seitenlehne by Pappsatt, while Felix Höffelmann and Philip Frowein magically make furniture appear and disappear again via stop motion in Bit by Bit. In Camel Özgür Ramazan reworked found footage until it is beyond recognition.

 

The Internet is still the dominant distribution platform for music videos. But a gradual trend can be discerned in this field away from mass websites like YouTube in favour of smaller web pages or communities that serve as filters or guideposts helping viewers to find their way through the plethora of material available online.

 

MuVi jury

Lillevan, live filmmaker (Berlin)

Eric Pfeil, author (Cologne)

Carine Le Malet, curator/programme director for Le Cube (Paris)

 

 

The 33rd Children’s and Youth Film Competition

37 entries from 17 countries (last year 36 entries from 17 countries)

 

The selection committee previewed 545 films for the Children’s and Youth Competition, which addresses age groups from three to 18 years. Like last year, countries figure strongly here that enjoy a robust and continuous short film tradition: Germany and the United Kingdom each have five entries in the running, and Netherlands and Denmark four apiece. Asia is represented with works from Thailand, South Korea and Mongolia, and Eastern Europe with films from Lithuania and Russia.

 

The programmes for nearly all age groups also feature documentaries, although these are far outnumbered by fiction. First love, loneliness, asserting oneself, feeling different from the others, problematic family relationships: these are the themes the films grapple with. Like the others, this competition also takes viewers to several different countries and cultural settings: from the Netherlands with a documentary on 11-year-old wood carver Merle, all the way to Mongolia in the Mongolian-Russian production Ulybka Buddy (Buddha’s Smile), in which a little boy left home alone struggles with the temptation to indulge in the sweets left before a Buddha shrine.

 

Festival programme online: 29 March 2010

 

Accreditation deadline: 6 April 2010

Online accreditation form here.

 

Oberhausen, 18 March 2010

 

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de, Tel 0208 (825) 3073