57th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 5 – 10 May 2011

The winners of the 13th MuVi Award

Award ceremony:

Saturday, 7 May 2011, 10.30 p.m. Uhr, Lichtburg Filmpalast, Oberhausen

The jury:

Jens Balzer, writer, Germany

Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, video artist, Iceland

Phoenix Perry, media artist, USA

First Prize

along with 2,500 Euros

Daniel Franke for One Minute Soundsculpture (Ryoji Ikeda), 2010

You couldn’t make a more successful video clip than Daniel Franke’s interpretation of Ryoji Ikeda’s piece One Minute Soundsculpture. Once you have seen this film, you will never be able to listen to the track again without seeing those video images in your mind. Franke illustrates a short piece of electroacoustic music – a sequence of static noise and test sounds – with the picture of an empty, square gallery space. Abstract forms emerge out of nothing to mutate into animated lines, which in turn mutate into an abstract creature that grows, floats and moves to the rhythm of the sounds. The sound sculpture turns into a visual sculpture, cause and effect merge until sound and image become indistinguishable. The aesthetic principle of the video clip – the perfect fusion of image and sound – is taken to a supreme level of perfection; and he does it with the most brilliant pictures we have seen in a long time.

Second prize

along with 1,500 Euros

Jutojo and Phillip Sollmann for There Will Be Singing (Efdemin), 2010

At first glance, the video for Efdemin’s There Will Be Singing seems like the simple and direct visualisation of a techno track, based on a geometric visual language: straight 4-to-the-floor beats meet the uniformity of modernist high-rise architecture. A kind of music that seems to tell no story and have no history. But wait! A second glance reveals that the high-rises were filmed from old, yellowing, tattered illustrated books on architecture. They are pictures of Chicago in the 1950s, which Efdemin combines with a tribute to the Chicago House and Detroit Techno of the 1980s and 90s. The historical references are superseded by nostalgia; nostalgia is superseded by horror at the brutality, the hostile emptiness of these old city panoramas. The camera zooms in so close that the photos seem to come alive, yet the only truly animated movement you see in this film is a hand that turns a page covered in post-it notes. It is only its musical appropriation that makes this visual world come alive in retrospect, to a life that it never really possessed. This is the magnificent, touching message visualised in this video clip with great skill and formal severity.

Third prize

along with 1,000 Euros

Darko Dragicevic for Ah! (Oval), 2010

Darko Dragicevic’s video for Oval’s track Ah! is fascinating in the consequence and elegance with which a radically disembodied kind of music is translated into physical movement. Moreover, the director manages to translate a basically unerotic piece of music into pictures of multiple desire. The female dancer dominates her male fellow dancers on the one hand and is cornered by their looks and desires again and again on the other hand. The delicacy of the music and its heavy, earthy character are both reflected in the video, which looks like a still life in which there is dancing. A clip that raises more questions than it answers.

MuVi Online Audience Award

voted for on the Internet and awarded with 500 Euros

Sebastian Huber, Robert Pohle and Johannes Timpernagel for Bagatelle I (sonic.art), 2011

Wir danken den MuVi-Partnern 2011, INTRO, tape.tv, ARTE Creative, byte.fm und 3sat.

Oberhausen, 7 May 2011

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, Fon +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de