The Festival: It all started in 1985 under the title No Budget Festival as a small festival that mainly screened super 8 films. Over the years it grew bigger and bigger and is nowadays one of the most important short film festivals in Europe that lures every year up to 14 000 spectators into the word of short film. This year we had over 3600 entries. 219 films from all over the world will be screened in the competetive programmes. The overall prize money will be more than 25.000 Euro. The festival is being held by the Short Film Agency Hamburg. The Festival directors are Jürgen Kittel and Karsten Stempel.
Our competitive programmes:
International Competition
Eight 90-minute programmes full of excellent shorts from around the world, what more could you possibly ask for? What? You want secret service activities, birds threatening to kill off mankind, burning embassies and torture chambers? Go watch television. On second thought, you might get what you’re looking for in our International Competition shorts, it might just look slightly different.
NoBudget Competition
The No Budget competition offers personal and very subjective films, home-made versions of the search for visual knowledge and short film productions by the inhabitants of the fringes of the mass media landscape. Traditionally, NoBudget programmes are instable, confusing, enriching and illuminating affairs. Prepare to be surprised. Our awards are: NoBudget Award & NoBudget Audience Award.
Made in Germany
Germany plays host to the world this year, we’ve been told over and over again, but before all hell breaks loose in and around the football stadiums of this Federal Republic, we’ll be inviting Germany to join us. In three programmes we’ll be showing you that the Hanses, Fritzes and Elses of the short film world are out there in force doing their best (and maybe wurst). You, the audience, will get to decide which one of these Teutonic offerings will walk away with the coveted audience award.
Our award is the Audience Award powered by Greenpeace Energy
Made in Hamburg
No other programme in our festival offers you the chance to sit in a cinema with more best boys, script girls, dolly grips, proud boyfriends of first-time directors and incredibly attractive extras than our two collections of locally produced shorts called Made in Hamburg. Shot around the corner, edited next door and then brought straight to the projection room, these programmes present the freshest films from what has been termed the creative heart of Germany, all garnished with an audience and a jury award.
Three-Minute Quickie:
Our Three-Minute Quickie films this year are even more nervous than they usually are. Filmmakers were asked to produce a cinematic take on trembling or shaking, and now we’ve got a full programme of shorts with a maximum length of three minutes quivering, shuddering, vibrating and, yes, oscillating all over the place. Probably more nerve-wrecking than working in an antique shop that specialises in fully functional old alarm clocks, but certainly also hugely more entertaining.
"Mo&Friese" Children’s Short Film Festival
This year’s 8th Mo&Friese Children’s Film Festival kicks off with an opening party including lots of shorts full of fun, excitement and adventure under the motto Easy-Peasy.
For the first time this year, we’ll have two awards to give away: the Friese-Award, which will be given to a film for children aged four to six by the Friese-Children’s-Jury (8-10 years) and the Mo-Award, given to one film for children over nine, chosen by the Mo-Children’s-Jury (11-14 years). The Mo-Award is sponsored by German children’s magazine GEOlino.
But apart from the new award, the Mo&Friese Children’s Film Festival will be offering its usual exciting programmes of shorts along with a special programme for blind and visually impaired children and a guest appearance from its sister festival for features, the Hamburg Children’s Film Festival. For more information see www.moundfriese.de or contact us at kinder@shortfilm.com or +49 40 391063-29.
Apart from the Jury and Audience Awards in these competitive categories, there will be additional awards in the International Competion: the Francois Ode Award and the Arte Award. For the first time we also host the Werkleitz Award and ZDFdokukanal prize; the latter reserved for documentaries.
Non-competitive special programmes: Against the categories
The special programme Sound of Images will be taking a look at the manifold artistic experiments in sound and image. From the 1920s and 30s to the present, from the early modernist stages of the mechanical reproduction of works of art to the digital age – artist-engineers have always been quick to work with and recontextualise new technology in order to render musical structures visible, and their work left its mark especially on the animated film.
Well, let’s see what we’ll hear.
Split Screen / Polyvision: Multiple images on a single screen seem to be everywhere these days, from successful TV series to Hollywood features. But no other cinematic form ever explored the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of split screens as thoroughly as the short film, and so we decided to dedicate a full special programme to this wonder of modern technology and its history from the 1920s to the present.
One person’s larks might be perceived as the centre of a potentially deadly flu epidemic by somebody else. For this special programme entitled On the Fringes of Humour, we went on a foray into the backwoods of the world of humour and even found some jokes in the suburbs of laughter. What we brought back ranges from the unintentionally funny to the deliberately offensive. In short: we have put together a collection of films that some might actually find funny.
In the Teens. In-between?
Adolescence is more tha just a waiting-room between child- and adulthood. It is a time of enthusiastic forays into sexuality, fresh ideals, frustration and doubts. And most of all, adolsecence is always one thing: intense. Two programmes told from a juvenile perspective, adressing everybody with a rest of youthfulness.
What else?
A Wall is a Screen: Label it under "Reclaim the Streets" if you want. What we do is simple but effective. As the name indicates we use architecture as a screen and project shortfilms on walls in urban environments. A nightwalk with filmscreening.
Meat the Producer :
This symposium will offer filmmakers the possibility to draw on the knowledge and experience of producers, distributors and festival representatives to learn about subjects of financing and realisation of shortfilm projects. The idea is to offer an exchange of thoughts and ideas about methods and terms of working on an international level.
Festival Club:
Looking for an alternative to a good night’s sleep? Then the festival club at Harkortstraße 125 might just be your cup of euphoria-inducing liquid. Dancing directors are guaranteed!
For press matters:
Jens Kiefer & Sylvi Hoschke
E-mail: presse@shortfilm.com
Internationales KurzFilmFestival Hamburg
Friedensallee 7 / 22765 Hamburg
www.shortfilm.com
Fon: 0049 40-39106327 / Fax: 040-39106320
