71st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 29 April – 4 May 2025
Announcing the competitions of the 71st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
125 works have been selected for five competitions
The 71st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen presents its competition line-up: A total of 125 new short film productions from 42 countries have been selected from over 6,600 submissions for the festival's five competitions – International, German and NRW Competition as well as MuVi Award and Children's and Youth Film Competition. With over 350 works in its thematic programmes, the festival will show a total of almost 500 films over six days. Oberhausen awards prize money totalling almost 45,000 euros in all competitions. The competition entries cover an enormous formal and thematic variety. They deal with current social and political issues, from climate change to labour, migration and queerness, but also address specific situations such as the dictatorship in Myanmar, the situation in Russia or the memory of the Bosnian war, presenting their topics in surprising and personal ways and often revealing unexpected connections.
International Competition
47 films from 30 countries were selected for the International Competition. With works from Cambodia, China, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, Asian productions are particularly well represented this year. Many filmmakers use documentary, performative and experimental approaches to tackle current political and social issues, from migration, queerness, labour or the disappearance of public space to the dictatorship in Myanmar and the Bosnian war.
Topics range from labour in a salt mine in the Iranian contribution Within the Sun (Sepideh Jamshidi Nejad) to the history of dictatorships in Myanmar, which director Lin Htet Aung tells in A Metamorphosis via the performative deconstruction of the country's flag, to the persecution of gay people in Cuba in the Cuban production Será inmortal quien merezca serlo (Whoever Deserves It, Will Be Immortal, Nay Mendl).
A remarkable number of films take up the subject of filmmaking and cinema in a wide variety of ways: From the British production Sinkhole (Kate Liston), which uses the story of a cinema in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to explore the social function of cinema, or the Finnish contribution Aavetuntohetki (The Ghost Feel Hour, Eero Tammi), in which the cinema auditorium and the film screening become the starting point for memories and dreams, to the Cambodian contribution Kauch (The Orange, Seakleng Song), in which a film screening inspires a couple to think about their future, or the Slovenian-British co-production Common Pear (Gregor Božič), in which scientists from a fictional future use film material to try to understand today's fruit cultivation in the face of climate change.
German Competition
22 productions were selected for the German Competition. Many of the works examine family relationships, often as a vehicle to address topics such as migration, dealing with National Socialist history, capitalism or queerness. Overall, there are numerous new directors to be discovered in this year's German Competition.
Pedram Sadough, for example, depicts the persecution of exiled Iranians in Germany as a psychological thriller in My Daughter. In Maksim Avdeev's Monument, a queer son who has fled to Germany comes to terms with his nationalist father in Russia. Silke Schönfeld's Die Unvorvorzeigbarkeit dessen, was nie hätte geschehen sollen (The impossibility of showing what should never have happened) shows how two sisters come to terms with the National Socialist educational ideals that shaped their childhood.
Katharina Bayer in A Provenance and Franz Wanner in Bereinigung II (Decontamination II), on the other hand, look at the current handling of the National Socialist legacy by examining expropriation and monument preservation, while Ulu Braun’s GERHARD is an approach to the most successful living painter with the help of AI, revealing the marketing strategies of the international art scene.
With Braun, Christoph Girardet (One Hundred Years Later) and Gernot Wieland (You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts), three previous award winners are back in the competition, while Helena Wittmann returns to the short film format with A Thousand Waves Away after her successful feature films Drift and Human Flowers of Flesh.
NRW Competition
Almost 250 submissions from North Rhine-Westphalia were previewed, 11 productions were selected for the NRW Competition. Here, too, there are many new directors in the selection. North Rhine-Westphalia plays a major role as a filming location this year – for example in Capriccio by Christos Dassos, when the filmmaker cruises through the south of Cologne in search of the last Bolex cameras. In Shawano, Felix Bartke portrays a western ranch somewhere on the A57 motorway, while Tom Briele draws parallels between portraits of the filmmakers Tom Alker, Jörg Keweloh and Friedhelm Schrooten and the demolition of old houses and industrial plants in the Ruhr region in Vom Ende her gedacht (Thinking from the End).
With four films (Ansitzen – To Sit on Watch, Franca Pape; Chrysanthemum, Jingyuan Luo; Nuestra Sombra, Agustina Sánchez Gavier, and Shawano, Felix Bartke), the Academy of Media Arts is more present than in recent years; another university film, Eram by Lucien Liebecke and Ole Christian Dreihaupt, comes from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art.
27th MuVi Award for the Best German Music Video
This year's MuVi Award, with 12 nominated clips, is unusually international: the selection includes co-productions with Japan (looking @ ghosts for die hunde, directed by Jeremias Heppeler), South Korea (K-Bob-STAR, for which director Hansol Kim uses a song by Cardi B), France (Quand le grenier aura pris feu for Anadol & Marie Klock, directed by Utku Önal) and Chile (Digo no con esperanza for F. V. te llaman por teléfono, directed by Francisca Villela).
DJ Hell and Jonathan Meese are taking part as MEESE x hell with their collaborative work Gesamtklärwerk Deutschland (director: Andreas Loff), as are Deichkind, who are performing in Könnt ihr noch? (directed by Timo Schierhorn, UWE), which juxtaposes AI-generated and handmade images and sounds, and Chris Imler with The Internet Will Break My Heart (directed by Markus S. Fiedler). KI is also used by Cellule 75 for the video Vernacular Dreamscapes: Nocturnal Dream Disposal for Black to Comm .
From 3 April to 3 May, all candidates will be available to vote for the MuVi Online Audience Award at www.muvipreis.de.
48th Children’s and Youth Film Competition
For this competition, 33 films from 24 countries were selected from around 750 submissions. It is organised in seven age groups from three years up to 16 years, judged by a children's jury (competitions up to 10 years) and a youth jury (competitions from 12 years). This year, Eastern Europe is strongly represented with entries from Croatia, Poland, Romania and Slovenia, as is Asia with works from India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Female protagonists dominate the films, many of which, starting with the works for the very young, are dedicated to the relationship of children to nature and the climate. Filmmaking itself, migration or queerness are also told for children and young people and from the perspective of children and young people; formally, the competition presents all genres from documentaries, feature films and animations to music videos.
Please find a list of all selected competition films here:
https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/festival/competitions/#t1763
Selected stills from competition films are available for download here:
https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/press/#c261
Accreditation deadline for the 71st festival is 23 April 2025.
Accreditation
Oberhausen, 19 March 2025
Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, phone +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de