The audience panicked when they saw the first moving images of a train arriving at a station. Pure immersive cinema. In her ingenious kaleidoscope, Belgian artist Soetkin Verstegen employs analogue animation film techniques to arrange reminiscences to early cinema as a world that enthralled audiences through fear, thrills and delight. Her tribute goes back to the horror stories, to the circus and the showmen who played their part in the invention of a cinema that may soon be gone.

Cornelia Klauß

In her live radio show Obaidah Zytoon plays the sound of the Syrian revolution. That’s how, in March 2011, her personal journey into the unknown started, full of hope and boundless energy. She is the narrator who introduces us to her friends, young people with an academic or artistic background who like to have parties on the beach or smoke hash in someone’s apartment. Elective affinities, united by the dream of a free life and ready to pay a high price. Together they also go out into the streets to film the protests. They produce what they believe the regime fears most: images. But then the events in the streets escalate and the images with them.

More and more frequently, Obaidah reflects, actions are performed for the camera. And yet the “War Show” is real in a brutal way. Travelling all over Syria, always in the line of fire and on the threshold of the next level of escalation, she documents the dynamics of war in seven chapters, from “Revolution” to “Extremism”. But it’s the personal narrative that puts everything in perspective. Obaidah Zytoon and Andreas Dalsgaard have viewed more than 400 hours of materials to shape this story which lets us experience how a departure is followed by a bottomless fall and how images help shape reality. What started as a video diary and digital grass roots movement becomes a requiem.

Lars Meyer

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Honorary Mention in the International Competition 2016

Crime story or love story? In 1988 Jens Michael Schau killed his life partner and fellow writer Christian Kampmann in the heat of passion. The media picked up the story because Christian was a famous writer in Denmark. Though Jens has long since served his sentence he still hides in his flat like a shy animal for fear of disturbing people by his mere presence. But the time has come for him, too: his story – the one behind the tragedy – must out. Protected by his own four walls Jens starts to engage with the camera, circling it hesitantly, always wary of himself. The director’s cautious questions from off-screen open a gateway to the past: an unconditional love which was also the psychology major’s coming out and the break with his conservative family.

The trip back through time to the liberal homosexual Copenhagen of the 70s and 80s ends in an emotional maelstrom of separation anxiety, jealousy and writer’s envy. Jens’s long overdue return to society plays out on two levels: the words he forces himself to say are reflected in the rehearsals for an autobiographical play. Jonas Poher Rasmussen in turn uses the actors to formulate his own questions about the subject: how can this story be told at all – and how do you live with it?

Lars Meyer