68th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 30 April – 9 May 2022
Award Winners of the International Competition
Award ceremony: Monday, 9 May 2022, 7.30 pm CEST, Lichtburg Filmpalast, Elsässer Str. 26, 46045 Oberhausen
Awards of the International Jury
Members:
Alice Butler (Ireland), Vanesa Fernández Guerra (Spain), Sohrab Hura (India)
Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen
worth 7,000 euros
Weathering Heights
Hannah Wiker Wikström
Sweden 2021, 30', colour
Statement:
This film evocatively disrupts the notion of a distinction between science fiction and our lived reality by giving expression to the difficulty of communicating in a world still reeling from the effects of a global pandemic. Weird and discomforting, the film manages to create a sensorial experience that feels sticky in its seepages as it probes through life in rural Sweden.
Principal Prize
worth 3,000 euros
YON
(Call me Jonathan)
Bárbara Lago
Argentina 2021, 8'08", colour
Statement:
In YON, the director gives an unprocessed take on their family and childhood by casting a totally unsentimental gaze upon home movie footage in which a raw portrait emerges of an uninhibited figure wrestling with their gender identity and squarely refusing to conform to gender stereotypes or repressive social norms. The irreverence of the subject does little to disguise the seriousness of intent at play in a film skilfully edited together to mirror the uncontainable force of childhood energy.
Special Mentions
L‘escale
(The Stopover)
Collectif Faire-Part
Belgium/DR Congo 2022, 14', colour
Statement:
The jury were struck by this deceptively simple film made by the innovative Collectif Faire-Part which sheds light on the experience of filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh, who were stopped and held against their will for a week at an airport in Angola on their way from Kinshasa to Frankfurt to present their new film. Accompanying the testimony provided by the filmmakers in the form of voiceover, the fixed image of an airplane window remains on screen throughout lending expression to the illusion of safe/smooth travel so plainly out of reach to the vast majority of non-white passengers.
Cadê Heleny?
(Searching Heleny?)
Esther Vital
Spain/Brazil 2022, 29'14", colour/black and white
Statement:
The jury awards a special mention to Esther Vital for her film Cadê Heleny? that brings back to surface, the story of Heleny Guariba: a philosopher, professor and theatre director disappeared in 1971 under the Brazilian dictatorship. With its intricate and empathic use of embroidery alongside the weaving in of anecdotal histories the film succeeds in touching similar stories of other similar suppressed histories across the world.
Short Film Candidate for the European Film Awards 2022
Sekundenarbeiten
Christiana Perschon
Austria 2021, 14', black and white
Statement:
Sekundenarbeiten defies our expectations of portraiture by being playful with the form and drawing out parallels between the spontaneity of the subject and the camera.
Prize of the Jury of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia
worth 5,000 euros
Members:
Miriam Gossing (Cologne), Ruth Schiffer (Düsseldorf), Lina Sieckmann (Cologne)
L‘escale
(The Stopover)
Collectif Faire-Part
Belgium/DR Congo 2022, 14', colour
Statement:
A journey to a film festival; a view out of the window of a plane. The formal reduction to passing cloud formations. A complementary report of two travellers from off screen. What do the clouds conceal? What do we know about human trafficking and the exploitation of humans for commercial purposes? The Congolese-Belgian film tells a haunting and moving story about the fact that the privilege of personal freedom and physical integrity is closely tied to the origin of the travellers as documented in their passports.
Special Mentions
Sekundenarbeiten
Christiana Perschon
Austria 2021, 14', black and white
Statement:
„To the last breath.“ Two artists, a shared cinematic space. Working with formal reduction and a separation of the visual and sound levels, this work unfolds the powerful portrait of an encounter between two generations and the materiality of their respective forms of representation.
Under the Lake
Thanasis Trouboukis
Greece/Finland 2022, 16'32", colour
Statement:
Epic, dream-like shots of nature on 16 mm. Bodies of water flowing and spreading uncontrollably. Powerless faces, marked by time, are watching. The quiet and open narrative style between fiction and observation creates a mesmerizing atmosphere that leaves space for one’s own reflections. Nature is on fire.
The International Critics’ Prize (FIPRESCI Prize)
Members of the Jury:
Lamia Fathy (Egypt), Hamed Soleimanzadeh (Iran), Ieva Šukytė (Lithuania)
Weathering Heights
Hannah Wiker Wikström
Sweden 2021, 30', colour
Statement:
For its thoughtful way of using a film language to create a deep ontological relationship between nature and human beings and of presenting existence.
Prize of the Ecumenical Jury
worth 1,500 euros
Members:
Jean-Jacques Cunnac (France), Joël Friso (Netherlands), Anna-Maria Kégl (Germany)
Zouhouron Zarqa’ Aadimat al-ra’iha tastayqizou qabla ’awanaha
(Odorless Blue Flowers Awake Prematurely)
Panos Aprahamian
Lebanon 2021, 6', colour
Statement:
If the world that was yours ends, if you cannot even smell the source of life, there isn't much left to say. This short film witnesses that the future seems far away, but hope lies in the image outside the cosmos of those who rule.
The ecumenical jury of the 68th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival awards its prize as the award of the Catholic film work and the Oberhausen Evangelical Church District in cooperation with the world catholic association for communication SIGNIS and the International Church Film Organization INTERFILM.
ZONTA Prize
worth 1,000 euros
for a female filmmaker in the International or German Competition
A Camera on my Lap
Shelley Barry
South Africa 2022, 17'57", colour/black and white,
Statement:
Low sounds of typing, the skeleton of a typewriter. A brittle voice talks about a radically changed life, a rupture. Artistic work is reconfigured out of isolation. The wheelchair becomes a dolly into a world of new interrelations. What can I do here, she says, what window to the world and what screen can I open? And how to celebrate the everyday in a post-apartheid suburb of Cape Town, South Africa?
Oberhausen, 9 May 2022
Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, niewalda(at)kurzfilmtage.de, Tel. +49 (0)208 825-3073