JURY DECLARATION:

Very well written text and fascinating observation of what surrounds us. "Silence of the World" invites the audience to breeze into the diverse beauty of stillness.

JURY DECLARATION:

Genuinely illustrated whispers of the mind, “Yuli" allow the viewer to witness the immersed flow of the protagonist's mind skillfully.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT:

I have lived in countries where mothers search for their missing children in rivers and amidst rubble. Surfaces is a film about the pervasive political and sexual violence in Colombia and Argentina. I address these social and political issues metaphorically, lamenting the privation of burial rituals and the alteration of death’s natural processes.

JURY DECLARATION:

With every instance of the performer’s changing gestures, “AKA” moves the viewer to distinct feelings. Impressively shot, an exquisite journey of and into an inner self.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT:

AKA comes from a deep emotion that invaded me, the depression. I started to visually transcribe many of these feelings in my mind like an architect. This process helped me to give them a form, to understand them and thus to get out of this "state" of being. The appearance of covid has triggered this feeling of unease in many people, it is a global health problem that remains very poorly known and misunderstood. I hope that talking about it and deconstructing it visually will help people understand this disease a little better. Furthermore, if it can aid people who are in the same situation, like watching this experience as a therapy, or knowing that they can re-create themself after a moment like this. Finally, I also thought this movie to express universal emotions that traverse every human being (death, life, sexuality,...etc ) I used Japanese inspiration - the red colour and the butoh dance for example- and hope it also will be an experience for every viewer.

JURY DECLARATION:

Consumed in the dark alleys of the city and of the mind, “Lack of Clarity” allows the audience to experience the restlessness in urban life in a masterfully sophisticated style.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT:

There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.” The prophetic words of the late french cultural theorist Paul Virilio was somewhat at the core of initiation of this project. The world feels more hyperreal to me than ever to me. A ground sense of confusion seems to hang in the air. A similar feeling to when you are deprived of sleep. Amnesia kicks in and the ability to focus has vanished. Sleep (and the lack of) was very much on my mind when making this film. The film is an attempt to dissolve the boundaries between the personal and the global. As in dreams or nightmares I became interested in the dissolvement of night and day, physical distance and past and present. A series of strange serendipity moments got me interested in the invisible connections between my own personal sleep patterns and dream, the lighting of Paris at the end of the 17th century, the military industry complex, the fates of Elvis Presley and O.J Simpson and the algorithmic surveillance systems that is being pushed all over the world these days.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT:

We would like to dedicate this award to the workers and denizens of the Edgelands, both human and nonhuman, to all those who have suffered the various forms of violence exerted on Beirut's Karantina district, and to those for whom the apocalypse is not a future possibility but a historical reality.