Honorable mentions of the Jury

TÚ ULTIMO DIA EN LA TIERRA von Marc Martinez Jordán

TÚ ULTIMO DIA EN LA TIERRA transports the viewer on a multi-layered journey through time and draws an incredibly exciting scenario about dealing with the loss of loved ones. Visually strong and extremely imaginatively implemented, TÚ ULTIMO DIA EN LA TIERRA succeeds in giving a whole new impetus to a topic in which many productions have failed. An extremely compelling and innovative work for a demanding audience.

CARLOTTA´S FACE von Valentin Riedl & Frédéric Schuld

Carlotta suffers from the rare disease of prosopagnosia. She cannot recognize faces. Together with the filmmaker Frédéric Schuld, the director and neuroscientist Valentin Riedl tell the self-portrait of the artist from the first-person perspective on her journey from confusion and isolation to artistic self-determination. We are very much looking forward to seeing Carlotta's feature-length documentary film coming soon, because after the informative five-minute animated film, which is as touching as it is entertaining, you cannot wait to see and hear more about Carlotta.

DIE FANTASIE IST EIN FLUCHTTIER von Ella Cieslinski, Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München

With her short film FANTASY IS A FLEETING ANIMAL, Ella Cieslinski throws us into the world of the young Spaniard Nicola, in search of a diffuse sexual fantasy. That the reality then feels different than the mere idea of a new experience, staged the director with great sincerity and precise observation.


Austronaut Od Perolaka is a dismal dystopia camouflaged in the feather robe of an artistic animation narrative. The film creates new ways and narrative ways of overcoming space and time. He is poetic, smart and tough.
Within minutes you forgot that you saw an animated film.
The nightmare casts a spell over the viewer and makes him shudder as soon as he realizes the eerie future of the capitalist world the director sends us. In his Science Ficiton movie, the body is a commodity that only the rich can afford. But what remains of us without our bodies. A ghost, or just the records of us. An idea of us? Are we free without him or trapped for eternity in a dark nimbus?
If Proust had not written a book for his theory of a leap through time but made an animated film, it would probably look like "Austronaut Od Perolaka" by Dalibor Baric. At the same time, the film is reminiscent of a mixture of Solaris by Tarakowski and last year in Mariánské Lázně. For the boys among us, "Austronaut Od Perolaka" may be the artistic answer to the Netflix series "Altered Carbon". But director Baric had no special effects and no Chanel costumes, but uses the means of animated film to convey his message and manages to create this shocking and surreal feeling.
The film delves deep into our minds and the moment you think you have grasped the incomprehensible for the mind, caught the fleeting thoughts, and then you escaped again and you lost yourself in the universe of space and time.


Director Andrew Stephen Lee manages to tell the depth and significance of a failed father-son relationship in a troubled country.
An adult son fights for the recognition of his father and buys a child to impress him. Circling around his own feelings, he behaves just as ruthlessly, uncomprehendingly and emotionally cold as his own father towards his purchased child. The old father behaves childishly, while his grown-up son looks at him with the expectant, radiant, sad eyes of a child. At the same time, his purchased child is already looking into the world with a dull callousness. Like an old man who does not seem worth living. The title would also work the other way around Manila is Full of Boys Named Men, about childlike parents and children in adult roles.
Boldly, the film concentrates on the essentials without being distracted by film effects, dispensing with color, exuberant dialogues, or a quick cut. The excellent camera work with long shots and gentle driveways does not seem artificial at any time but lets the feelings of the actors become noticeable. Likewise, the reduction to black and white focuses on the core of the narrative. Neither is the color missing, nor does the black and white look artificial and wanted. The chosen stylistic devices of the director do not seem like an empty artistic shell but serve every moment of the narrative and are filled with the contents that are negotiated without directly naming them or talking about them. This is an essential skill and the art to which the medium of film is capable. To describe a situation, to make feelings felt without talking about them. The spoken dialogues are apparently outward. It's about karaoke and Michael Jackson's death, but what's actually being negotiated lies in the overtones. As so often in our reality.

DARK CHAMBER von Otto Banovits

Through a tiny hole in the outer shell of a steel wall, the scene of an idyllic car park penetrates like a head-on projection of a Camara Obscura into a narrow space. Outside, children play, travelers buy an ice cream on their way to vacation. The world seems to be in perfect order. The camera floats over the silhouettes of seemingly sleeping people in the narrow space, on the small air hole and penetrates to the outside. There it rises and we recognize the space as a container of a truck, which is being opened by police. The police officers get a terrible picture. But the irritation is not permanent. The daily life continues, the dead stay behind.
Otto Banovits' short film Dark Chamber is based on a true event from 2015, when 71 illegal refugees have found a tragic and avoidable death from suffocation in a truck. The re-enactment of the event with only a single slow camera movement over individual fragments of the scenery allows us to understand the overall picture only at the end and makes the catastrophe so impressively visible to the viewer.

DER HUND BELLT von Stefan Polasek, Filmakademie Wien

In his film THE DOG IS BARKING, Stefan Polasek takes the viewer into an absurd world of stifling monotony and dullest routines. Family and work colleagues are insensitive to any deviation from everyday life. Only the neighbor's dog, who every day destroys the meticulously laid out flowerbed, brings the seemingly perfect suburban idyll out of joint and paves the way for a radical and bloody, but in the end, hopeless outbreak attempt of his main character.
Stefan Polasek convinces with his screenplay of extraordinary humor and equally accurate and consistent staging of his absurd world, with which he takes our comedic society to the grain and lets the viewer question his own everyday life.