The NoBudget-film is both the festival’s origin and its laboratory. It creates an environment for radically subjective views, for experimenting, marginal, borderline, demanding, non-commercial and innovative short fi lms. NoBudget puts attitude and the creative process into the limelight. There are two prizes in this category: One is awarded by the audience, the other one by a jury.

NoBudget IKFF Hamburg 2014 Preview from Hamburg ShortFilmFestival on Vimeo.

Time and Again

Our first surprises came packed in bags and we took them along on the paths of our lives. We watched early fantastic wonders on illuminated walls in dark rooms. Many of the yet unexplainable events burnt themselves into our malleable minds. Meanwhile our perceptions deeply penetrated the unknown, irritating and exciting us as we participated in the most impossible concepts. NoBudget’s recreational facilities are going to test our viewing capabilities once again, far away from regular visual materials.

It all begins with waiting. The invitation to ›Take it from the Top‹ keeps the gaze lifted upwards until the first image is cut. Two-week periods transmit their transfiguration into another dimension. The replication of a moment starts a carousel of perspectives. In the black hole, recordings condense into an animated kaleidoscope. Next door a roundelay of love is performed in a hall of mirrors. The lust for life is getting really sweaty from all that encouraging singing. Flared tempers enter pop heaven on an overwrought orbit. Ceremonial fragments transmit the exhibition run to Earth. Literary packaging designs indicate that the reading material is a signpost steeped in history. In the last chapter a hunting scene takes a shape that doesn’t fit on the couch.

›Safety Adventures‹ take us dangerously close to exotic places. We get lost in an auricle’s soft labyrinth. As we look for an exit, we reach the other side of reality: insanity. Organic life forms reshape themselves over and over again through steady motion sequences. This is followed by a walk on an educational trail through a biotope. Is it a recreation of paradise or are we marvelling at the original itself? Seismographic deflections are recorded directly under the surface of the image. The fascinating energy inherent in the elements can be unleashed on smaller objects as well.

If you still want to explore further removed spaces, feel free to use NoBudget’s ›Eye-Opener‹, which will send your perceptions into even more abstract worlds of experience. Photons impact on your retina, hypnotizing your unconscious senses. Great silver screen experiments gather for the 100th birthday of the animation pioneer Norman McLaren. Point patterns which are directly perforated into the film itself create this ›Double Vision’s‹ soundtrack. The following triptychon combines sound-generated pulsing structures to an audio-visual minimal symphony. Events are fluttering in the rapture of colour at a banquette of love. A three-way street scene is recorded in an overlayed colour-coding system. A sound recording turns into a wandering film object through image editing. Don’t forget to put on your glasses when you are watching the spectral coloured mobiles. There are heavy imagery thunderstorms in the dark room. Optical illusions show us a projector room, or have we already become the cinema itself? The changes are fluent, drifting light reflexes keep the perception in meditative movements. Last remnants of images are collected in deserted projection rooms and are assembled to a final trailer for the analogue cinema.

›Someone Somewhere‹ is to be found where windows in deserted suburbs express their adoration. It gets even lonelier on the Chilean mesa: The last inhabitant haunts a ghost town. From closer and non-existent places we learn about visions of life that still seem incredible. An acoustic experimental arrangement misses its entry at the last minute. »Is the door open on this side?« The temporal visit to 1970s Berlin is transported to another scene via telephone. Behind a shop’s lingerie display the only male protagonist practices his emancipation. Two very different neighbours finally get a bit closer in two simultaneous films. A cigarette’s length is sometimes all that separates life and death.

Two patients find themselves in an irrational world after some ›Flash Therapy‹. We participate as observers. The farewell from a popular meeting point is honoured in the perspectival long-term layout of space. Untreated yoghurt is fortified with an additional taste component in a traditional way. The manual tells us why. With these guidelines in mind, we enter nocturnal visions, but we can’t find their creator here. We receive existential cries for help from unknown sources on our radar screen. Distant anonymous voices read a code into the expanding night and give witness to an invisible existence. Immersion in the repetitive questioning won’t lead to any answers. Dumps of consumptions with their neon lights break into the loneliness of an impressive landscape. Meanwhile, the lights go on in Micropolis. The technicians begin their high-voltage work. Final sequences merge in reproduced short segments before parting again.

›The Bright Side of the Sun‹ lights up our lives every day. A year has gone by, and once again we find ourselves at a familiar place. Calculations that were written down on spread sheets form the score of self-reproducing composition. Further finds in an abandoned poster shop are the props in a virtuously animated rock musical. Mom’s the lead and the soundtrack is freshly recorded. Another no longer existing room has left its stock behind as a projection. A search for traces researches the event. Finally an often heard short film earworm gets the right to reply. Listening strengthens the viewing process to an intense snapshot in time which we unknowingly began to shape ourselves. In the affiliated reverberation room looking is slowly being disconnected from transmission. And that is when the NoBudget surprise bag no. 30 has been emptied and distributed at last.

Text: Giuseppe Gagliano