/award winners fall 2016

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BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE FILM: Jasmine (United States) by Dax Phelan. A year after his wife's murder, once-successful Hong Kong businessman Leonard To (Jason Tobin) is still reeling from the tragedy. Having lost his job, friends and all sense of order in his life, Leonard becomes obsessed with a mysterious stranger he sees at his wife's grave, believing him to be responsible for her death.

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BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM: Herr von Bohlen (Germany) by Andre Schafer. The film tells the story of the last offspring of a powerful German family, whose cannons killed countless people in two world wars: Arndt von Bohlen and Halbach - the Last Krupp. Unwilling to fulfill the expectations of both his family and their company, this homosexual industrialist's son waived his inheritance of around three and a half billion marks. Or, to see it differently, was pushed into relinquishing a world dynasty because he was unable to lead it. With an annual settlement of two million German marks Arndt withdrew into another world. In his residences on the German island of Sylt, Marrakesh, Castle Bluhnbach in Salzburg and Palm Beach the extravagant bon vivant gathered a fairy tale royal household around him - and yet remained a lonely and withdrawn man for his whole life.
 

BEST NARRATIVE SHORT FILM: Dryad (France) by Thomas Vernay. The wind blows, noises of armor resound. A knight escorts a young woman athwart plains. The thunder begins to scold, clouds invade the landscape. The knight, worried, stares the castle on the horizon. The end is close.
 

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM: In Memory of The Chinatown (Taiwan) by Chun-Tien Chen. May a building have its own reincarnation? Once upon a time, there's a region of canal's dockyard in the center of Tainan city in Taiwan. Later in 1970s, the canal gradually lost its function and the large residential and commercial mixed mall 'Chinatown' had been built at the site. Chinatown was once the most prosperous mall in the city, however, by more than three decades of rise and fall, the city's authority planned to demolish the building for urban renewal plan. The Chinatown makes no exception of those failing shopping malls all around this island. As for those residents who have lived in the Chinatown for a long time experience most of the death and life of the city.
 

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM: Allergy (Colombia) by Juan Manuel Galvis. Allergy is a 2D short film animation with illustrations made in a tradicional way with the sound of Amambay 100 000. A fat men is immersed in a industrial defragmentation of his body. He reacts in a mystical way after meeting and african wizard. A ritual full of dance, smoke and strange symbols, help him to find the cause of his allergy, and let him see the insects that the fan blows on the air suffocating his lungs and dividing his body in pieces.
 

BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM: That's it (Netherlands) by Sabine Molenaar. Where do dreams end and reality begin? In this oppressing dream the personage drifts among layers of reality, claws her way back from nightmare dreamscapes and morphs to creatures hidden in the darkest recess of our minds in a dream that transforms body, time and space. Nothing is what it seems. In spirals of discomfort the personage keeps the viewer in a state of non-control mirrored, opening the gateway to other worlds of perception where but one burning question exists: where do dreams end and reality begin?
 

BEST AUSTRALIAN CINEMA NOW: Journey (Australia) by Radheya Jegatheva. An astronaut called Orion is alone in space. He asks a lot of questions, like how did he get here, how is he still alive, shouldn't his oxygen have run out, etc. Eventually he meets another astronaut whose name is Aurora. She gives him a polaroid of Earth (the story revolves around the idea of finding home), and they set off to find 'home'. Along the way they see a lot of beautiful things and a bond forms between them. Then they come across a black hole. Orion sees that Earth, the home that they are looking for, is in ruins, slowly getting sucked towards impending doom (which explains the remnants of humanity that surround them). Aurora dies and Orion (somehow) survives by getting hit by another piece of debris, which sends him hurtling away from the black hole and into the abyss. Some time later he regains consciousness and wakes up in an ocean of stars. He realises that he is holding the polaroid of Earth. He lets himself go and cries after the memories of Aurora. But he knows that home is gone now, and he lets the polaroid of Earth go, setting off into the endless void.