the winners
1st Prize:
Gintaras Makarevicius (LT)
Winter Parallels [ 2007, 54'00'' ]
2nd Prize:
Cristóbal León, Niles Atallah, Joaquin Cociña (CL)
Lucía [ 2007, 3'55'' ]
3rd Prize:
Manon De Boer (BE)
Attica [ 2008, 9'55'' ]
Jury statement on the Prize Awards
Preliminary to this statement, it has to be pointed out that the decision-making process has not been simple for us at all.
The heterogeneity and at the same time the general high quality of the submitted film, video and animation works required a standing questioning of our own judgement standpoint and criteria.
On the other hand, the subject matter of the works did cover a great spectrum of contemporary artistic confrontations -from documentaries of everyday stories, through psycho-dramatic, symbolic montage-narrations, to the forms of re-staging and re-telling history, so virulent in the last years.
From the aesthetical point of view, common to almost all works was the shifting between mise-en-scene, documentation and fiction, and consequently the involved reflection on the adopted means of filmic language.
Good stories telling about life are delineated beyond the representation of power and its institutions like human resources. This historical Credo of documentary film form the basis for the film Winter Parallels, by Lithuanian artist Gintaras Makarevicius. The film tells four stories: from a school, a refugee camp, an animal shelter and a towing service. In each location and relative context there is a protagonist. The four plot lines of these passing-by hemispheres of everyday life never meet nor interfere with each other. Rather they are connected through the rhythm of montage, the lights which act as staging moods, and the changing camera perspective, which alternates between 'being in the middle of things’ and distant prospective. In the same way, on the sound level, every scene is precisely located in the narration network between distance and closeness. These stylistic elements of compression of the story line create gradually between the different narrations an atmosphere of escalation which is deposited in the everyday life. It was this intensity and the simultaneous maintenance of distance in the use of filmic means that completely convinced the jury.
Telling about the own personal life always takes the risk of losing oneself in the private and of being relevant only for the self. The love story which is told us by Cristóbal León, Niles Atallah and Joaquin Cociña with the animation work Lucía, translates personal issues in the form of a psychological analysis of a situation, through the mean of stop motion and through a chain of associations which appears at the beginning surreal. The whispering voice, the transformation of the whole interior of a bedroom, from the vase of flower, to the furniture, to the walls of the room, embroil all everyday objects as potential media of this psychological situation. The perfect handi-craft realization of this animation serves exclusively to narrative intensity purpose without referring just to itself.
Forms of the so-called 're-enactment’ have been playing a central role in contemporary art for many years. It seems that history is no longer transferable in the present through left-over artefacts, documents and notations, but rather it has to be translated through moments of re-enactment and re-interpretation in order to get hold of it. In Attica Manon De Boer refers not only content wise, but also explicitly conceptual as well as formal to this interface of historical quote and interpretation.
With the music piece Coming Together by Frederic Rzewski, which again refers to a prisoners' rebellion in the prison Attica in New York, she grasps on one hand at a music form which, already at its origin, thanks to its improvising character, expresses as open, the relationship between notation and performer,. On the other hand the two camera movements, consisting of two 360-degree-pans mirroring each other, refer to the escalation of the prisoners' rebellion, which is concretely named in the song book, but also endlessly extended in time and place. It is the achievement of this work, which generates re-enactment of history not in the duplication as a spectacle but analysing the structure as a surplus with its own language, which makes the act of interpretation of history evident and tangible.