Awards

Our family jury selected the film Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) by Ben Russell as the winning film. Employing ascetic means of expression and Dubai workers, the author reintroduces the work by the Lumiere brothers of the same title. The static scene, absence of sound and the entrance of chance thus create a construction site of ambiguous interpretations.

For its complex approach to ethnographic filmmaking, its sensuous psychedelia, its self-reflexive and intricate weaving of voice and landscape.

Our choice, A Spell to Ward off the Darkness, is partly allegorical, partly post-apocalyptic and partly a Black Metal music video. Its questions and problems are not resolved. They keep returning to the central theme of how to live when no present models appear to work. The movie shifts modes between portraying a failed commune, an aborted attempt at seclusion and a cathartic but ultimately senseless musical release. We congratulate the filmmakers."

For the following reason: For its ability to construct a complex link between early cinema and contemporary ethnographic and documentary tendencies, as well as its moltiplicity of (triangular) forms that allow us to simultaneusly womder openly and immerse into tension that build an human experience.

Within a powerful selection of films that challenge conventions of nonfiction cinema-films that reveal the limitations of biography and autobiography, that bear witness to trauma and its legacy, and that investigate the politics of image making, especially of "official histories"-the jury has decided to award the "CULT AWARD - TRUE STORIES IN CINEMA" (20,000â'¬ in collaboration with the satellite TV channel Cult, Fox Channels Italy) to Ben Russell's Let Each One Go Where He May, a film that subverts clichés of ethnographic cinema, and that mesmerizes and provokes through a sensibility that is at once dream-like and irreverent.

3rd place