VI International Competition of Kinodot EFF


Congratulations to our prizewinners!

Our 2018 Jury first special mention goes to Destination Nowhere by Prapat Jiwarangsan (Thailand 2018) for it’s intelligent and aesthetically convincing technical-aesthetic decisions to work with monotonous and repetitive manual work and a rough sound to evoke questions of (in-)visibility and precariousness of a marginalized person in a dominant surrounding.

Our 2018 Jury second special mention goes to Optimism by Deborah Stratman (USA / Canada 2018) for it’s humorous and sensitive research into the landscape and history of a special place linking it to the allegorical and conquering quest for light and sun, gold and wealth - and evoking the film-historic genre of gold digging on many levels as an underlying metaphor.

With great unanimity we would like to give the award for best film at the 2018 Kinodot Film Festival in St. Petersburg to a film which stands out for its brilliant complexity, its multitude of narrative layers, its subjective urgency. We were thrilled and enchanted by the aesthetic and sensitive diversity of styles, how animation builds up from the structures in the photographs. We were equally intrigued by the convincing visceral quality of the soundtrack and especially the voice with it’s different acoustic levels. The grandmother's story is dealt with fragile complexity and we see and hear the work of a filmmaker/artist who manages to densely combine aesthetic and concept. So the 2018 award goes to Where is Eva Hipsey? by Orla McHardy (Ireland 2017)

The Jury: Madeleine Bernstorff, Andrea Slovakova, Yakov Lurie, Marc Pelletier

Films in competition:

A Plastic Bottle's Stair Dance
by  Mikhail Basov
2018

A plastic bottle performs a stair dance, hopping up and down, tapping off wild rhythms like a Broadway dancer. (...)

Accelere Chapultepec
by  Kaveh Nabatian
2017

A hypnagogic 16mm dance hallucination that stars the enthusiastic traffic cops of Mexico City. Set to music by the filmmaker’s band Bell Orchestre. (...)

Cargo
by  Jasmine Ellis
2017

Uncertainty of reality that permeates daily life. Is what's happening really happening? CARGO is a short, one shot dance film. (...)

Destination Nowhere
by  Prapat Jiwarangsan
2018

One day in Japan, a young man found out that a place he had thought his only home country rejected him. (...)

Elastic Recurrence
by  Johan Rijpma
2017

From all directions gravity pulls on the shards of a breaking dinner plate. (...)

Film-collage 2 - introduction
by  Anaïs Ibert
2018

Couldn't the impossibility to communicate be compensated by the ability to feel?
Astrid Defrance "Les écritures dramatiques (post)modernes : le traducteur à l'épreuve du sens et des sens" (...)

Flame
by  Sami van Ingen
2018

A fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. (...)

Forest Paths (forget Heidegger)
by  Michiel van Bakel
2017

A warped stroll through a forest.
Animated still photographs reveal movement and light on the forest paths that are otherwise invisible to the human eye.
Van Bakel made a ‘scanner-camera’ that extends human vision to near-infrared light in an other-worldly way.
What’s this thing called vision? What’s the fundamental difference between what a robot discerns, what a flying insect detects or man’s observation? (...)

Gare Paris-Saint-Lazare, 10 avril 2017, 12h03-12h07
by  Pablo-Martín Córdoba
2017

Sculpted by time, video forms reveal the dialogue between humans and the architecture that channels their movement. (...)

Hijacked
by  Shambhavi Kaul
2017

Airplane space is inhabited by characters for whom ‘escape’, one of the promises of airplane technology, proves elusive. (...)

Katagami
by  Michael Lyons
2016

This stop-motion animation was made by photographing and
re-photographing antique kimono resist-dyeing stencils in positive and
negative. (...)

L'envol
by  Patrick Bokanowski
2018

Choreography of an imaginary journey (...)

Martin Cries
by  Jonathan Vinel
2017

Imagine you wake up one day, all your friends have disappeared. (...)

NN
by  Pablo Mazzolo
2017

NN: Nomen nescio (Latin for "no name"), a person whose name is unknown.
The film revolves around the specter of thousands of disappeared civilians during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1982), trying to offer a reflection on human subject as anonimity.
The film reanimates frame by frame archival footage from an Argentinian newsreel. (...)

Optimism
by  Deborah Stratman
2018

Draw down the sun. Dig up the gold. (...)

The urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find gold in alluvial gravel is part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, smelters, former city officials, and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot on location in Dawson City, Yukon Territory. (...)

Overland (part one)
by  James Edmonds
2017

A fragment of memory is briefly evoked. The memory of a boat journey, of traveling as a child. (...)

Please Come Again
by  Alisa Yang
2016

An experimental film essay that narrates the collective and personal memory of three generations of Asian women through the rooms of Japanese love hotels. (...)

Sky Room
by  Marianna Milhorat
2017

Someone is missing. Plants grow, but at what cost? Technology threatens and seduces as humans attempt to solve a mystery through telepathy and mirrors. Stainless steel and broken glass strewn about an intergalactic discotheque. (...)

Song For Billy
by  Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
2017

A meditation on a lost era of coal mining and the regenerative power of the sea through the haunting photographs by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen of England’s post-industrial northern coastline, the vivid re-enacting of the death of a young coal miner Billy by his workmate and the cathartic music of a New York based percussion group So Percussion. (...)

Tangled
by  Pille-Riin Jaik
2017

The film deals with falling in love, being in love, trying to remain in love, falling out of love and the aftermath. The relationship pattern that somehow often repeats itself. The beautiful hypnotic aspects, mesmerizing rhythm, fractures in characters, tighter closeness, but with it also growing tension and the hardness of letting go. In a sense it’s a meditation on personality of a love, where the personal decisions that may seem to exist at the start (archive photo, hand sewing, endoscopic closeness of the lense) are rather directed by society’s constraints, learnt family’s behavior patterns, traditional stereotypes and norms (mechanical sound, industrial rhythm, abstract visuals). In this story one could recognize her/his’s possible desires to follow the classic story of romantic love, but also feel it’s rather frequent war-like destructiveness. It is still attractive in love to believe in Moirai thread 1 driven destinies. (...)

What Time Is Love?
by  Anna Franceschini
2017

T.U.V. is a corporation qualified in providing european certificates of suitability to goods and commodities. Its Nuremberg headquarters, where the video has been shot, is specialized in toys and infancy products examinations. (...)

Where is Eva Hipsey?
by  Orla Mc Hardy
2017

Where is Eva Hipsey? is an experimental animated film that blends documentary, fiction and poetry. It is based on a short story written by Justin Spooner. The film seeks to convey the power of sound to store and evoke memory. (...)

XCTRY
by  Bill Brown
2018

A pocket-sized travelogue about leaving one hometown and looking for the next one. (...)

(...)

Your father was born a 100 years old, and so was the Nakba
by  Razan AlSalah
2017

This doc-fiction is a (re)construction, a (re)collection of the memory of returning to Haifa. It is an imaginary memory of retuning to Haifa. Razan AlSalah is imagining her grandmother was able to return to Haifa when she was still alive, through Google Streetview, which today is the only way she could see Palestine, the only way Razan can see Palestine. (...)