AWARDS 2025
Erratic Lands – A visual journey on Alpine Apparatus by Julian Berger | Julian Berger’s animation film captures the recipient’s attention from the first image on. Based on fine-grained geological data, the filmmaker models a digital fiction of the Alps and the technical infrastructure that permeates them. It is precisely this overlay of reality and the plausible with the condensed scenario of a deserted infrastructure landscape rendered obsolete by climate change that makes Erratic Lands such a visually and thematically impressive analysis.
This Werewolf Complex by Heather E Andrews | This Werewolf Complex would be a successful awareness-raising tool if it weren't simply a remarkable short film, regardless of its ostensible subject matter. Heather E Andrews gives intimate insights into persons’ experiences with epilepsy without portraying them as patients. While we hear personal reports about aura and the very individual forms in which they can occur, on a visual level viewers enter a surreal at times quite humorous setting underlining the ambiguous experiences.
Durchgangsland by Daniel Fill | Optimists will discover in Durchgangsland a film about a European idea of coexistence. One that perhaps can only be formulated in a place that, from the outside, seems forgotten by the world. The biographies of the portrayed residents of Franzensfeste/Fortezza find their way to this place by chance; once they arrive, however, Franzensfeste/Fortezza becomes a characteristic anchor point. Daniel Fill succeeds in peering behind the facade of this seemingly cold, transitory land. The space he grants his interviewees is occupied by much more than mere narratives about a place; it speaks of flight, patriarchal violence, capitalist exploitation, and other challenges of our time, and how the fate of the protagonists in Franzensfeste changed for the better.