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4/5/2005

International Short Film Festival

Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen

51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

"I smoked my first cigarette here. For years, I saw every single film at the Westdeutsche Kurzfilmtage, looking forward to those days in Oberhausen every year . These events were important for me, for my decision to become a filmmaker."
Wim Wenders

The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, one of the oldest and most renowned film festivals in the world, has always been flexible in dealing with political and aesthetic change, choosing its own standard of quality against which the "short idea on celluloid" is to be measured. A film isn't selected in Oberhausen simply for being well produced. A work must always be judged against its own claim of being something new - regardless of genre, production quality and budget. The decisive factor is a film's position vis-à-vis social reality, cultural differences and aesthetic innovation.

TheShort Film Festival presents far more than a mere medley of current short productions. One of the most outstanding features of the Festival is the meticulousness with which its program is compiled. Individual works are thus brought into relation to one another, ideas and trends are elaborated and interaction rendered possible, leading to a refreshingly new short film experience. Today, every imaginable format of moving picture is presented in Oberhausen, covering the entire spectrum of the short form. The short film has long since shed its entertainment or educational function as an opener to the main feature. Instead, it now leads a very lively existence - extending far beyond the confines of the cinema.

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Thematic programmes at Oberhausen
Artists from Poland, Great Britain, Germany, international music videos, student films, business and more

The 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, in addition to its competitions and large-scale special programme "The fallen curtain: the self and the other since 1989", is presenting a series of smaller special programmes ranging in size from five to around 30 films. Five specials are dedicated to individual filmmakers and artists, others feature international music videos or children's short films about Africa, and much more.


Featured artists:

25 years of Anarchistische Gummizelle AGZ (6 + 7 May)
Slapstick? Politics? Dada? The members of the Düsseldorf collective AGZ (Anarchistic Padded Cell) met in a class at the art academy and straightaway began producing Super 8 short films, from 1980 to 1990. Their first works were ”direct responses to the politics of the times”, say the cell’s occupants, who include Ulrich Sappok, Otto Müller, Heinz Hausmann, Stefan Ettlinger and Thorsten Ebeling. Two programmes in Oberhausen will present a large selection from the group’s newly founded ”Anarchive”, including semi-classics like Im Rhenushaus (1981), Deutschlandreise (1983) and Der schwarze Film (1981).

Once again from the top... Stefan Hayn (6 May)
Berlin filmmaker Stefan Hayn constantly resists bowing to our expectations of form and genre. His films translate reality rather than reproducing it, often as ”alien detail”, as one critic wrote. He will be showing two programmes of very disparate films: while Fontvella’s Box (1992), with its focus on sexual identity, stands for the fictional side of his work, films like Ein Film über den Arbeiter (1997) and Gespräche mit Schülern und Lehrern (2002, co-directed by Anja-Christin Remmert) address socio-political issues more directly, examining how they are represented in documentaries.

Mark Lewis - The cinematic gaze (8 May)
Mark Lewis is a filmmaker whose works are more for art spaces than for cinema halls. Lewis began using film as a medium in 1995, focusing on the aspects of cinematic language and with an increasing emphasis on image rather than narration or sound. In fact his films have an elementary narrative structure with little or no sound. Lewis’s films are realised with professional crews and machineries like industrial film productions. They bear references either to the history of cinema, starting from the Lumière brothers, and/or to the history of painting and of photo-pictorialism. The subjects of the films are mostly what Marc Auger defines as non lieux in contemporary urban contexts, taking into account their history and their actual use; and occasionally natural landscapes where the symbolic values of the sublime are emphasised.

Jozef Robakowski - Energetic images. Biomechanical recordings (6, 7 + 9 May)
Jozef Robakowski is without doubt one of the foremost and most influential figures in contemporary Polish art. As an artist, film and video maker, photographer, draughtsman and more, he has been represented at international events ranging from documenta 6 to exhibitions at the MoMA. Together with curator Piotr Krajewski, he has compiled three programmes especially for Oberhausen making for the most extensive show of his works thus far in Europe. Light, performances and the realities of how the artist relates to his immediate surroundings form the themes of the individual programmes, which run the gamut from The Energy Manifesto (2003) to Z mojego okna (From My Window, 2000), which was screened in the Oberhausen International Competition in 2001.

Crossing frontiers - Laura Waddington (6 + 9 May)
It comes as no surprise that English filmmaker Laura Waddington studied English literature: she often combines literary texts with meticulously composed poetic imagery in works that mesmerise viewers with their hypnotic power. Waddington’s productions - Zone, shot with a spy camera on a cruise ship, The Lost Days, directed via the Internet with camera people in 15 countries extend the frontiers of the form, while her subjects are often real borders, journeys and refugees. She has won several awards for her film Cargo, including the ARTE Prize for Best European Short Film at the 48th Oberhausen Festival in 2002. Her newest film, Border, will have its German premiere in Oberhausen in this year’s International Competition.


More film programmes:

MuVi International (6 May)
A selection of current international, unconventional and experimental music videos - clips that refuse to comply with all-too-familiar standards.

Student films from North Rhine-Westphalia (9 May)
Current productions from students of NRW film schools.

Children's shorts about Africa

Award-winning films from other festivals

Partys, festival café, lounge


Business:

At the Film Market all competition submissions are available for undisturbed viewing at one of 15 video stations: a total of almost 5,000 current productions in all. An extensive catalogue in German and English, which enables comprehensive research and is available a few weeks before the festival online at www.kurzfilmtage.de, facilitates searching for and selecting films. For the first time this year, submissions can be made to the festival and viewed via the digital platform www.reelport.com.

On Producer’s Day on 9 May lectures, presentations and discussions all revolve around a pressing theme relevant to short film. The future of commercials forms the focus in 2005, featuring an exciting line-up of advertising films, some of which have not yet been released.
Information: Sylvia Szely, szely@kurzfilmtage.de

A seminar for film students takes place in co-operation with NRW.Bank

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The Fallen Curtain: the Self and the Other Since 1989

In its 2005 special programme, the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen explores how people have been rebuilding their identity and their relationship with society since 1989 and how short films in the former ‘East’ and ‘West’ reflect this search.

When the border fences in Hungary were torn down, the era that had divided the world into clearly defined blocks for half a century came to an end. Capitalism now reigns supreme and the search for an individual and collective identity has become the central issue in a world that no longer offers any guidelines on political systems. Religions, nations and cultures are being bolstered as collective bastions against the impending onslaught of the ”empire” à la Hardt/Negri, while those who have no desire to follow either the lures of the social market economy or reactionary ideologies embark on a long and difficult search for alternatives or an ‘other’ option. ‘”The self and the other since 1989’ is conceived as an inventory of crucial questions that art has posed to society since 1989”, says curator Marcel Schwierin.

Looking inward as a political view
As a result, the short film since the 90s has been marked to a great extent by individualisation: coming to terms with one’s own childhood, psychological structures and personal views of society. This has frequently been criticised as withdrawal from the political to the private world. But what is being addressed is sociological groundwork, as new light is shed on the structural nucleus of society: the relationship between self and others. The post-1989 film seems to be saying that every new vision of society should stem not from analysis of macro-structures but from close observation of human behaviour.

Part of the programme: Amazons, Alina Rudnitskaya, Russia 2003

The matrix of the Soviet Union
The process of searching for identity began in the Soviet Union much earlier. In the multinational central state with its amazingly independent provinces, a fraught but also fruitful dialogue emerged, leading to unique film cultures in regions such as Armenia, Georgia und Kazakhstan. Local film culture was not so much an expression of genuine national identity as a product of intense cultural debate between the Moscow control centre and the regions. The themes addressed by filmmakers in the Soviet Union both before and after 1989 and the way their work correlates to productions in the West emerge as a matrix for examining the problem that many view as the burning issue of today’s world: the relationship between supranational and local cultural identity. ”Oberhausen essentially had a reputation for providing ‘The Window to the East’ prior to 1989”, explains festival director, Lars Henrik Gass. ”But our Festival has always explored the question of how social reality is reflected in images. To a certain extent this programme represents the essence of all our concerns”.

Themes
The lost utopia of an alternative society, the falling curtain, attempts to understand the other side, relationships, the family as the ”nucleus of society”, the individual and the political all of these issues are among the themes picked up by individual programmes of the ”The Self and the Other Since 1989”. Other programmes shed light on materialism as the common basis of socialism and capitalism, science fiction as the global utopia of the 60s, conspiracy theories as the most dangerous of all world notions (curated by Christiane Buechner), and finally the relationship between humankind and animals the totally different inhabitants of this ‘one world’.

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, Tel. +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de

International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
Grillostr. 34
46045 Oberhausen

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