/award winners summer 2017

Best Narrative Feature Film: Venus Obscura (France) by Christophe Karabache. A theater director leads his two actors and his assistant to an isolated cottage in the open countryside in order to better rehearse for their theatrical performance of Heiner Müller's « Hamlet-machine ». Once on sight, the small troupe faces not only the dullness of daily routine, tensions and the usual hurdles of rehearsals, but eventually strange occurrences that turn out to be extraordinary and extreme in nature.

​

Best Narrative Short Film: Girl A (United Kingdom) by Jess O'Brien. A teenage girl is reprimanded by the head teacher of her school following a violent incident with another student. As we follow a section of her life over three days, the reasons for her violent behaviour are slowly revealed.

​

Best Documentary Feature Film: Jelena (Canada) by Ryan Northcott. 'Jelena' is the incredible true story of one of the boxing worlds most unheralded heroes: 8-time World Champion Jelena Mrdjenovich. With devastating knockout power and the obsession to maintain her position at the very top, Jelena is truly one of the sports best kept secrets. The film chronicles Jelena's career and training regimen as she prepares for her 48th pro fight against undefeated European champion Gaelle Amand, with both her WBC and WBA belts on the line.

Best Animated Short Film: Where it Floods (United States) by Joel Benjamin. Blind stubbornness in the face of global catastrophe, and the victims thereof. Calvin, his wife Patty and their son, Kenny, try to maintain their farm and survive in a flooded mid-western landscape despite the fact that (mostly) everyone else seems to have moved on to somewhere safer.

​

Best Documentary Short Film: Sherry (United States) by Eliane Lima. Sherry is an experimental documentary film which witnesses the private life of Robert, a 75 years old gentleman from Orange County. Every day, Robert transforms himself into a living doll, Sherry. Info: This project began in Fall 2014 when Lucrecia Martel (visiting filmmaker) took a group of CalArts' students to Robert Sherry's house.

Best Experimental Film: Stuff As Dreams (United Kingdom) by Guli Silberstein. Panicked news reports from scenes of terror that may or may not have happened, and family and travelling images that might have been a dream or maybe not, are intertwined into a painterly collage breaking-up and collapsing into itself, exploring both personal and public perceptions of an increasingly fractured world. ''Melted into air, into thin air...we are such stuff As dreams are made on.'' The Tempest, Shakespeare.

Best Australian Cinema Now: An Algorithmic Life (Australia) by Rewa Wright. Video sequence created from a series of algorithmically generated computer files, modelled in Maya using custom shaders and displacement maps.