1st Prize:
“Resonating Surfaces” by Manon De Boer (NL/BE)
2nd Prize:
“Forever Live: The Case of K. Gun” by François Bucher (CO/DE)
3rd Prize:
“A man called love, notes from a work in process”
by Tamar B. Guimarães (BR/SE)
Jury statement on the Prize Awards
I would like to thank Franco Marinotti and the Fair Play festival on behalf of the entire jury for inviting us to Berlin. It was very inspiring to spend these days watching the Fair Play selection of video works and to look into their respective subjects with some intensity.
The program's wide spectrum of documentary work was remarkable; ranging from very finely executed, conventional documentary film to experimental implementations of documentary material into more artistic approaches. This tendency did have an influence on the jury's decision. Despite diverging positions, the final decision on the awarded works was taken somewhat unanimously.
[Herbert Schwarze]
3rd Prize
“A Man Called Love, Notes From A Work In Process” by Tamar B. Guimaraes (BR/SW) is a filmic essay on Francisco Candido Xavier, a Brazilian Writer of earlier popularity, who claims to not have authored his many books but had instead merely been the recording stenographer of dead people's words, who were dictating these texts to him.
Xavier's heyday dates back to the time of the military dictatorship in Brazil that started with the Coup d'Etat in 1964 and lasted until the election of Tancredo Neves in 1985. The commentary which is the film is cleverly weaving archive material into the story, which makes for a very vivid illustration of everyday life under military dictatorship.
Also, first and second prize's directors give expression to a more political to socio-political content, but they are overall more indebted to the formal aspect of experimentation than is Guimaraes piece.
2nd Prize
“Forever Live: The Case Of K. Gun” (CO/DE) by Francois Bucher succeeds in building up suspense through an edit free, more or less unmoving 15 minutes sequence, that shows a woman speaking on the phone seen from behind in a total view of an industrial, sky scraping landscape. The audio track consists of a female voice translating parts of Franz Kafka's 'Der Prozess' (The Trial) into English. Katherine Gun, the woman in the work, is cautiously approaching the literature text that she is reading out for the first time. Her quest for the right tone and for appropriate expressions to translate into doesn't only add to the familiar text's many nuances of words and meanings, Katherine Gun does also place 'The Trial's' subject matter into a context of some actuality: During the last Iraq War's preparatory stages, she has worked for the United Nations translating and had made public an illegal tapping operation of U.N. personnel by the United States and Britain.
1st Prize
“Resonating Surfaces” by Manon de Boer (NL/BE) is working about language and modes of expressing oneself in languages as well, but she does approach the subject in a more multilayered manner. Numerous off-voices are telling stories about their personal relationship with the Brazilian language, which is being introduced not only as a hybrid medium of different local cultures, but also as the language in which colonial structures and experiences under colonial rule have been inscribed.
Pan shots capture grey blocks of high rise panoramas ... different sounds and noises ... visuals and sounds can not be allocated with certainty, single portrait shots of diverse people can be brought into a greater context with loose ends only. But by and by and through repetition of single images, the suggestive composition of the work evolves and narrows its focus to one specific woman's fate. Her story is a story about translation and re-translation, about her long way home back into her own language. The woman had abandoned her mother language in favor of French as a consequence of traumatic experiences under military dictatorship. Through French, the acquired and foreign language, she finds a way back to her native tongue...
Jury Members
Knut Åsdam (NO), Joan Leandre (ES), Herbert Schwarze (DE), Berta Sichel (ES), Maria Rosa Sossai (IT), Gabriel Soucheyre (FR), Noah Stolz (CH).