International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

The Festival mourns the loss of filmmaker Agnieszka Jurek

In May 2024, her film Vermessung der Tristesse (Measuring Tristesse) was awarded the Prize of the German Competition at the 70th edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Now the filmmaker Agnieszka Jurek died of a long illness on November 25, 2024. Jurek was born in Poznań, Poland, in 1971. After attending art high school for five years, she studied sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Poznań and art and film at the Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where she graduated in 2003 and became a master student of director Uwe Schrader in 2004. Her diploma film does that hurt you?, a workshop discussion with the American director and artist David Lynch, was shown at film festivals in Leipzig, Fundão, Utrecht, Basel, Stuttgart and Vilnius. Her trilogy of experimental works was presented in Oberhausen: Pastas an Marcel (2003), Eselsbrücken (2016) and Vermessung der Tristesse (2024), for which she not only received the Prize of the 2024 German Competition, but also the “highly recommended” rating from the German Film and Media Rating Board (FBW). In its statement, the Oberhausen jury wrote: “The moment is a way out, can be a salvation and let you sense infinity. A moment and then another moment, sensations that lie like islands in the course of time. Next to it, a child growing older, in a forest that always seems to remain the same. Breathe in, breathe out.“

The Festival team mourns the loss of an outstanding filmmaker and our thoughts are with her family. In memory of Agnieszka Jurek, the Festival will be showing Vermessung der Tristesse on its website on Friday, November 29, 2024 from 6 p.m. CET for a period of 24 hours free of charge.

Oberhausen, 28 November 2024

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