Festival Internacional de Cine de Monterrey FICMTY (Mex) || 30.08.2018 Mejor Cortometraje Internacional de Ficción: CASTING, Katarzyna Iskra, PL Mejor Cortometraje Internacional de Animación: FOX BOY, Do-Yeon Tak, Republik Korea… Read More
Magazine
Awards July 2018
Durban International Film Festival (ZA) || 29.07.2018 Best South African Short Film: STILLBORN, Jahmil X. T. Qubeka, ZA Best African Short Film: AYA, Moufida Fedhila, Tunesia Best Short Film: LA… Read More
Introducing: Patreon – alternative crowdfunding instead of financing through advertising
The platform Patreon was founded in 2013 by Sam Yam (formerly of AdWhirl) and the musician Jack Conte. Conte’s personal motivation was dissatisfaction with changes at YouTube. Despite millions of… Read More
Film Festivals in Cinema Programmes of Major Cities – A New Global Business Model
The first part of the research focused on scam festival calls for entries, as well as on pseudo festivals that are held beyond the public sphere. In connection with… Read More
Lina Sieckmann and Miriam Gossing
Working together radicalised us
Lina Sieckmann and Miriam Gossing have known each other since their youth, having both grown up in the same small town and studied at The Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). Still, it took years until they became a team in terms of their artistic endeavours. Read More
April 2018
Busan International Short Film Festival (South Korea) || 30.04.2018 Grand Prix: SCAR, Choi Jungyeon, Republik Korea Excellence Award: SEMI-BASEMENT, Min Hyunki, Republik Korea Cinephile Award: SCAR, Choi Jungyeon, Republik Korea… Read More
Introducing: The Film Network – a portfolio platform for short film
In 2005, that is, before the launch of YouTube, various departments at the BBC founded the BBC Film Network online platform to enable short-film makers to present themselves and their… Read More
YouTube access restrictions – two typical examples
While the controversial obligation to incorporate upload filters is still being discussed at the European level and is not off the table yet, the largest platform for online videos, YouTube,… Read More
Awards March 2018
Vilnius International Film Festival “Kino Pavasaris” (LT) || 29.03.2018 Award of the Short Film Competition: PIRTIS (BY THE POOL), Laurynas Bareisa, LT Audience Award: MADRE, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, ES Annual Ann… Read More
Tendencies in Short Film and the Task and Mission of Short Film Festivals
A thirtieth birthday is a highlight and a crisis to the same extent, as Ingeborg Bachmann said in her short story “The Thirtieth Year”, the first sentence of which we considered prefixing as a title to this piece. The second sentence reads as follows: “Yet he himself, although he wasn’t able to discover any changes in himself, has become uncertain.” The future may indeed be even greater and vaster than the past, but the course of what is to come is slowly being set now. Read More
February 2018
ZUMEFF Zayed University Middle East Film Festival, Abu Dhabi (UAE) || 28.02.2018 Best Animation: LONG ROAD, Adel Essam, Egypt / USA Best Narrative Award: CLOSE YOUR EYES … WELL, Ali… Read More
Review of award-winning short films in 2017 – a brief analysis
Based on the impression that just a handful of short films take the lion’s share of awards and honours each year all over the world, we decided several years ago… Read More
Almost Faint or the Like.
The Video Works of Stefan Panhans
Since the beginning of the 2000s, Stefan Panhans has made a name for himself with works that refuse to be clearly assigned to an artistic genre or field of practice and entwine still and moving, as well as found and newly created images and spaces within constantly changing constellations. Doing so, he works with photography in which filmic plots are intimated, video installations that merge elements of theatre and computer games, texts that evolve like fictions you can enter, and performances that become films. He produces images of a present that is defined by the rhythms of goods and media consumption, that prefabricates their promises of salvation in the form of advertising, therapies and lifestyles and, doing so, fans the desires for the authentic and the immediate at the same time, and lets them ossify in their own clichés. Read More
Januar 2018
Bamberger Kurzfilmtage || 28.01.2018 Spielfilmpreis: ALL THE TIRED HORSES, Sebastian Mayr, A Dokumentarfilmpreis: MR. UPPERCUT – HOW TO BE A CHAMPION, Maximilian Conway, D Animations-/Experimentalfilmpreis: THE MAN IS BIG, Anna… Read More
New anti-film-piracy measures – radical change for the web Part 2: EU copyright directives, upload filters and content ID
EU copyright laws have long been lagging behind the digital reality. So the new ‘Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market’ is designed to remedy this situation. While the… Read More
November 2017
Certamen de cortos Ciudad de Soria-Castilla y León (ES) || 26.11.2017 Premio Mejor Cortometraje: CHIKE, Lucia Ravanelli, ARG Premio Mejor Cortometraje Animación: PUSSY, Renata Gasiorowska, PL Premio Mejor Cortometraje e… Read More
Erik Schmitt
Just the first few seconds of this film are enough to create an all-pervading sense of oppression that predominates for the next 15 minutes. “Berlin Metanoia” is a dark, almost (hellishly) dreamlike trip into the innermost realms of a city that loves to market itself as young and cool, but which has lost its soul somewhere between hipsterism, tourist onslaughts and hype. In his latest short fiction film, which celebrated its premiere at the 2016 Berlinale, Erik Schmitt approaches the latent psychotic Berliner identity with an intensity that continues to reverberate for a long time afterwards. Read More
Laurels for Greenbacks – Making Money with Short Films in a Thriving Festival Scene
A few years ago, I already reported on a ‘film festival’ that was never held, but for which an anonymous festival organiser pocketed the film submission fees. At that… Read More
Checklist for Online Festival Submissions
Many online submission platforms are now teeming with film festivals – but often these are not genuine festivals as such and the film festival designation is amiss here. In these… Read More
New Anti-Film Piracy Measures – Radical Change for the Web
Part 1 Controversial Browser Copy Protection to Become Standard On 18 September 2017, following years of discussions and fierce resistance from non-commercial internet organisations, the World Wide Web Consortium… Read More
September 2017
Festival de Cinema de Girona (ES) || 30.09.2017 Millor Pellicula Curt Ficció: EL BARBERO, UN RELATO DE AUTODEFENSAS, Abraham Escobedo Salas, Mex Millor Pellicula Experimental Art Film (ex aequo):… Read More
Lukas Marxt’s films need a special type of audience
Lukas Marxt wasn’t particularly surprised when Adam Hyman of the LA Film Forum told the audience at the Goethe Institute Los Angeles they need not worry about the narrative of… Read More
Kyne Uhlig and Nikolaus Hillebrand – Digital isn’t always better
The films by Kyne Uhlig and Nikolaus Hillebrand are full of things that you would usually find in the kitchen or a closet. Gherkins march in step, spoons develop a dubious life of their own and lonely socks desperately search for their better halves. The filmmakers, who live and work together in Cologne and go by the name of “niky-Bilder”, prefer to use everyday as well as lost-and-found objects and breathe new life into them for their animated films – and that’s especially practical considering that they live right next door to their studio, making it easier to, whenever the need arises, place the contents of their domestic cupboards in the spotlight. Read More
The Video Essay – More Discourse than Terminology
“Every Frame a Painting” is the name of Canadian filmmaker and editor Tony Zhou’s YouTube channel, which has been online since 2014 and engages with the phenomenon of cinema…. Read More
documenta 14
Roars of warfare in the cinemas and a cannibal in the tofu factory Film as medium at eminent exhibition documenta 14 from Adam Szymczyk constitutes a reading of modernity’s… Read More
August 2017
Festival Internacional de Cine de Monterrey FICMTY (Mex) || 31.08.2017 Mejor Cortometraje Internacional de Ficción: HIJO POR HIJO, Juan Avella, Venezuela Mejor Cortometraje Internacional Documental: KOPFÜBER, Daniel Thomaser, D… Read More
AVA Short Film Library Networks Festivals with Libraries
The “Audio Visual Access” (AVA) project, which is supported by Creative Europe MEDIA, networks European short film festivals with local public libraries, with the aim of reaching and attracting… Read More
The eye is idle, but not lazy
“Der Tag des Malers” (The Day of the Painter), Werner Nekes’ (almost) unknown masterpiece
When Werner Nekes died on January 22nd, 2017 the film world not only lost an artist but a scholar too. Just as there are painters simply in love with colour… Read More