After four festival days and 26 films competing for the awards, the festival juries & audiences have decided on their favourites.
GRAND JURY GRAND PRIX (Jesse McLean, Petar Milat, Mika Taanila)
Comfort Stations (Anja Dornieden, Juan David González Monroy)
A film that is brilliant in its structure of image and sound. It starts slowly and sweetly as a somewhat private study on nature's little creatures and unfolds into a disturbing metaphor of human consciousness.
The Remembered Film (Isabelle Tollenaere)
This film was selected because of its creative storytelling and the impressive way in which the filmmaker develops intimacies between viewer, cameraperson and subjects. In an inventive but precise manner this film shows the instability of history, the collective memory of war and the naïve of its youthful participants.
Silica (Pia Borg)
To make home a place in nowhere; to make this world become another one: that is a process, a natural force we are used to call cinema. A region of wilderness where contingent, strange and unexpected encounters of narratives and materials do occur. We award a Grand Prix to Silica by Pia Borg for film that directs us to that originary and moving location, a proper multiverse with so many real and fakes names attributed. Kino, bioskop, cinema...
CRITICS JURY AWARD (Alejandro Bachmann, Miro Frakić, Silvestar Mileta)
Sunstone (Filipa César, Louis Henderson)
Sunstone traces the connections between visibility and vision from the architectural phenomena of a lighthouse to satellite surveillance and GPS tracking. While this thematic trajectory intrigued the jury it was the formal composition of the film - a film that never lets you settle down in a secure visual and thus ideological position towards what you are seeing, and a film that connects its topics and subplots in such a deeply associative manner without ever becoming random - that convinced us. In the discussions among the jury it became clear we are confronted with a texture that shifts and expands constantly: a unique vision delightfully beyond our grasp. Thus, Sunstone might be a bit like the one motive it follows through - a vibrating wave, an oscillating ray of light, a visible structure that fascinates us exactly because it seems to have re-arranged visibility per se.
CRITICS JURY SPECIAL MENTION
Last Year when the Train Passed by (Pang-Chuan Huang)
Taking the passing of a small number of buildings on a train ride as a point of departure the film then interrupts the fleeting gaze with one that is more investigative, that does not want to move on, but stay, that does not only want to register but to understand. Thus, the film discusses central aspects of documentary film ethics without ever losing its subjects out of sight. Last Year when the Train Passed By is a cinematic reflexion on distance and proximity and its connections with movement and stasis. These abstract ideas are not thought through in the film but actually put into action in the process of encountering the world with a camera.
GREEN DCP AWARD (25 FPS Association)
September 3, 2015 (Sara Jurinčić)
This year we saw several powerful films made as part of non-compulsory education – film clubs, workshops and film schools. Which is indeed the scope generating and nurturing alternative film – because of the spirit of freedom, courage and openness to experiment. The film that surprised us the most this year is a title that dissolves and skips film genres to face a personal trauma.
AUDIENCE AWARD
The Migrating Image (Stefan Kruse)