Awards – Alternative Film/Video festival

The international jury of the Alternative film / video festival, composed of: Senka Domanović (Serbia), Reem Shilleh (Palestine/Belgium) and Tomislav Šoban (Croatia), decided to include the following films on the Festival’s list of significant achievements:

All authors of films from the list will have an opportunity to apply for a residency at the Academic Cinema Club of the Student City Cultural Center.

The jury decided that the author of the film Iranian Bag, Maryam Tafakori, also received the “Sonja Savić” Award, a partner award given by the “Nadežda Petrović” Art Gallery from Čačak in cooperation with the Alternative Film/Video Festival. The award includes a one-month stay in Serbia, as well as an exhibition and presentation of the author’s works in Belgrade and Čačak.

The Jury Statement:

BLUE DISTANCE, Devin Jie Allen (USA)

“A constant erasure of the present forged by a collective past” appears on one of the black screens during the film, and so insists on the gesture of examining the folds of remembering collectively and individually. The traversing images, the subtle sound and intimacy of a voice generate a force that pulls us into a very intimate space that is memory.

A LINE IS NOT A LINE, Miljana Niković (Serbia)

A film essay of dynamic structure, interesting blends of image, footage and text, with unexpected inclusion of noises and processed music. It is as if the film is taking over the contemporary meme aesthetic of pastel colors as a template. Gradually, it creeps under our skin (enters the mind), playing with the multiple notion of line and different concepts of alignment, creating from the viewer its ally.

DECONSTRUCTION, Parashar Naik (INDIA)

With touchingly poetic associations, this film essay detects class and racial issues on several levels. It portrays the real incident from 2015 in a layered and innovative film way. Regardless of the wit and charm of the narrative, it does not trivialize problems for a moment. On the contrary, it makes the viewers aware that they are not judging a book by its cover, a candy by its wrapper, or humans by their skin color.

IRANI BAG, Maryam Tafakori (IRAN/UK/SINGAPUR)

By looking at cinema as a place for subverting politics and social regimes, the film is a presentation of how touch is mediated in recent Irani films. How to create touch when touch is prohibited? How does an object, the mediator of touch, migrate from one film to another, in order to overthrow structural impositions? As the filmmaker’s mediation/text hovers around the film extracts, we are introduced to this object and its position in Irani cinema.

WE ARE SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON, Rustic Mascara (UK)

Online wandering of male and female GTA avatars on the periphery of a computer-generated landscape image. While they are trying to recite an excerpt from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, they are also trying not to be killed by one of the other online players. This suspenseful experimental video keeps viewers in suspense until the very end by subverting the classic video game convention.

SANDOVAL’S BULLET, Jean-Jacques Martino (Ecuador)

Encountering death is a transcendent experience, and living with a bullet means living with a constant reminder of that event. Using black blanks, allegorical landscapes, kaleidoscopic spots, but also shots from everyday life, the author creates a meditative rhythm that draws us into the specific world of this witty and warm film essay.

In Belgrade, December 11, 2021