WINNERS

Best Comedy Short Winner

fiSOlofia

Three retired friends love to talk in a bar in their country. They do not talk about politics, sports or local gossip but are questioning on philosophical themes that will bring them to life in an animated way. The flashbacks of a more erudite narrator than others will open up surreal moments that trigger these new questions. Between doubts and certainties, between faith and reason, friends will reflect on the fundamental questions of existence.

Nicola Palmeri

Best Director Winner

Gaslighting

The short film is about a dangerous form of manipulation. Gaslighting means one person overpowers another by manipulating their perception – through unsettling lies, flustering projection and constant guilt-shaming. Such mental and emotional abuse keeps the victim confused and conditioned on the gaslighter. At the end the protagonist emancipates from the toxic relationship in a surprising way.

Tina Matzat

Best Drama Feature Winner

Nour

When fifteen-year-old Nour is forced to marry Maurice whom she despises, her carefree summer days morph into claustrophobic confinement and household chores. Nour mourns her lost childhood and scattered dreams.

Khalil Dreyfus Zaarour

Best Drama Short Winner

Clearing

Gust, an imaginative ten-year-old boy goes to meet his stepmother’s family for the first time. He is the only child other than his baby brother, who gets all the attention whilst Gust gets left behind to occupy himself with his imagination. At the family meeting Gust meets his aunt Vera. Just like Gust, Vera experiences the meeting from a distance and soon it becomes clear that she doesn’t function like the rest of the family. Though she tries hard to be accepted in the same way as her younger and more successful sister Nathalie. The adults treat Vera like a child but with his fanciful and unprejudiced view, Gust gets interested and fascinated by her. When Vera desperately runs away after yet another incident, Gust decides to follow her into the woods, where he finds her standing in a lake. They become aware of each other and the connection they share and decide to wait in the woods together as the family party carries on without them.

Margo Mot

Best Experimental Winner

Maria's Silence

This film is based on documentary material but is not, strictly speaking, a documentary film. Nor it is a work of fiction. The film rather appeared to us like a dream, not a nocturnal dream, but one which unfolded day by day while shooting. A dream shared between the photographer-director and the actress (or, better, the woman portrayed in the feature), which nevertheless seemed to follow its own, enigmatic necessity through which the daily shots joined almost magnetically, interweaving in a pattern of superimposed layers that unceasingly merge and dissolve one in another, in the constant flux, crystallization and reshaping of psychic interior. At a certain point, this dream seems to end but in fact it only opens up to another dream, or hallucination, where the film itself abruptly starts to burn, unleashing new and old visions – fragments of reality – until it is put out by a sudden storm and dissolves in a twilight of sea-waters. In this sense, the film is also a meditation on the elements, Water and Fire, Wind, Earth and Skin, inspired by a Sun-Eye that appeared almost by itself in one of the first shots and took possession of the narration, in the endless flow and unfathomable metamorphosis of all things and beings.

Cesare Bedogne

Best Feature Documentary Winner

Calm In Chaos

Calm In Chaos is a documentary about first responders and PTSD

Tracey April Cochrane

Best Feature Film Winner

Funny Story

After years of being a neglectful father, a womanizing TV star decides to crash his estranged daughter’s vacation in Big Sur.

Michael Gallagher

Best Greek Film Winner

Heimlich

Heimlich is homely. Paris lives in an unhomely home. Serena wants a home, in a place you wouldn’t exactly call Paris. They drink. They talk. They merge. In water, beer and memory. A frog leaps. Strange. Stranger. Unhomely. Unheimlich. Stranger than home.

Kostas Bakouris

Best Music (in a film) Winner

The Astronot Soundtrack (Crashland)

Best Music Video Winner

KCPK – The End

The cinematic video is capturing a teenage girl's worst nightmare through adolescent angst, bathed in underlying sexual tension, and depicts the inevitable end of youth and purity.

Loïc Andrieu

Best Screenplay Winner

Reflections

In a society close to our own, where the poor take an important role in the equilibrium of the community, Leria, a young woman in need is passing a job interview.

Florent Agostini

Best Short Documentary Winner

Little Fiel

Artist Fiel dos Santos grew up during the 16-year-long civil war in his home country of Mozambique. The only one of his family to never have shot a gun, today he makes art out of guns to commemorate the lives lost.

Irina Patkanian

Best Short Film Winner

Alone

Based on Chabouté's Graphic Novel

Antoine Laurens

Best Writer Winner

Blind-Sighted

A failed young athlete loses her sight after an operation. In a desperate attempt to get her life back on track, she teams up and falls in love with a disfigured guide runner who helps her try to qualify for the national blind running team.