68th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 30 April – 9 May 2022
Filmmakers and artists from six countries
The Profiles of the 68th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
From 4 to 9 May 2022, the 68th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is presenting six retrospectives of international filmmakers and artists in Oberhausen whose practice ranges from documentaries and feature films to experimental films and expanded cinema. Rainer Komers (Germany) and Morgan Fisher (USA) are both multiple award-winning filmmakers, Sohrab Hura (India) is best-known as a photographer, while a younger generation of artists and filmmakers is represented by Eszter Szabó (Hungary), Sylvia Schedelbauer (Germany/Japan) and Shalimar Preuss (France).
Morgan Fisher (USA)
Two programmes of selected works are dedicated to Morgan Fisher, one of the great North American experimental film pioneers. His theme is the means and methods of moving image production, often conceived as expanded cinema. Among his best-known works is the 35-minute Standard Gauge from 1984, which became the title of the eponymous exhibition of Fisher’s works at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2005. In the 1990s, Fisher turned towards painting, drawing and installation, but returned to filmmaking in 2003 with ( ) (Parenthesis). Oberhausen has repeatedly presented the artist’s works since the 1970s; in 2007, Fisher produced a version of his Screening Room for Oberhausen, which will also be screened.
Sohrab Hura (India)
The Indian Magnum photographer and filmmaker, based in New Delhi, works at the intersection of film, photography, sound and text, combining diary formats with questioning a constantly changing world in his filmic works. In 2018 he won the Prize of the Ministry for Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia for The Lost Head & The Bird, in 2020 he was awarded the Principal Prize of the International Jury for Bittersweet. These two films will be screened, along with Pati and The Coast. Hura’s works have been presented at film festivals and exhibitions like the Liverpool Biennial 2021, the Videonale and the Cincinnati Art Museum. They have been collected by the MoMA, the Ishara Art Foundation and the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Rainer Komers (Germany)
Rainer Komers, born in 1944, is one of the major German documentary filmmakers. In three programmes during the Festival in Oberhausen and additional programmes in the run-up presented at the Cologne Filmforum and Filmhaus, the Festival is presenting the extensive body of work of a multiple award-winning filmmaker, who has been distinguished, among others, by the Ruhrpreis für Kunst und Wissenschaft, the Hesse Film Prize and the German Short Film Prize. His filmic poems derive their strength from a visual fascination for the modern age and its industrial and urban aesthetics, which he re-contextualizes with a sharp eye for the manifold mutual interdependencies of humans and nature. The three programmes presented in Oberhausen focus on early works about the region, from the early We Will Buy (1967) to B 224 (1999), the Cologne programmes present additional works from all stages of his career. Komers will also present a selection of personal favourites in the NRW in Person programme.
Shalimar Preuss (France)
Shalimar Preuss’s themes are summer, nature, growing up. Her award-winning films have been screened at Oberhausen, Rotterdam and Clermont-Ferrand, among others. Two of her works competed in Oberhausen’s International Competitions: Rendez-vous à Stella-Plage, for which she received a Special Mention in 2010 and which was also nominated for the European Film Prize 2010, and Étrange dit l’ange in 2017. Her first feature-length film, Ma belle gosse, was released in 2012 and won the prize for best French Film at Belfort. In addition to Rendez-vous à Stella-Plage and Étrange dit l’ange, the Festival is also showing L’escale from 2007.
Sylvia Schedelbauer (Japan/Germany)
“Sylvia Schedelbauer is easily one of the most impressive moving-picture artists to emerge in the past decade.” (Artforum) Her films move in a space between historical narrative and the personal and psychological realm which she navigates through poetic manipulations of found footage and archive material. Her numerous awards include the VG Bildkunst-Preis, the German Film Critics‘ Prize and the Gus Van Sant Prize for the best experimental film. Oberhausen has repeatedly screened her works, most recently Labor of Love in 2020, which will be presented again this year, along with works from Memories (2004) to Wishing Well (2018). Her latest work, Oh, Butterfly! (2022) has also been selected for the 2022 German Competition, and the Festival will present the world premiere of a work commissioned from Schedelbauer for the 60th anniversary of the Goethe Institut Tokyo.
Eszter Szabó (Hungary)
The Hungarian filmmaker and painter Eszter Szabó combines painting, 2D and 3D animation and video in her works, often as animated versions of her paintings. Her themes include manifestations of everyday social processes, vulnerability, inertia or unfulfilled longings. She received the Leopold Bloom Art Award in 2021, the same year that her work Széphercegnő (Princess Beauty) was shown in the Oberhausen International Competition. The Profile features a selection of her films from Shapes (2006) to Pickle (2022).
High-resolution stills from the films are available here.
Oberhausen, 31 March 2022
Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, T +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda(at)kurzfilmtage.de