European Short Film Audience Award (ESFAA)

We should definitely mention the Catalonian The Prince, the one out of the ten films that manages to drive the short format the furthest in terms of the narration and style. A narrative about a dancer who undergoes his father’s corruption scandal just as he is preparing for his grand dance performance. This film fleetingly yet thoroughly sheds light on the ‘discreet charm’ of the upper classes, while developing, frame by frame, the catchy visual dynamics and rhythmics in its dance scenes.

The social and political sphere is further explored by the films Sign and See the World and Curfew. Among the beforementioned eternal everyday dilemmas of the European family and society, the two can serve as the Brechtian alienation and a reminder that actual wars are raging around us. The first film is an impressive archival post-colonial research of lesser-known WW2 fighters, while the second is a fiction portraying an encounter between two young lost people at the backdrop of the contemporary wartime Ukraine. This slice of nightlife could function as a simple boy meets girl story or as a search for connection in a fragmented world, if it weren’t for the subject of the curfew that permeates it with tangible discomfort, skilfully underlined and metaphorized by the use of natural and artificial light.

Since every quality short film selection should offer some relief and shift away from the everyday problems, you should also note Puolanka Pussy Rally and The Ninth Village, which are the two crowd-pleasers of the selection. With their direct and unpretentious travesty, they prove that, despite the hard times, some most peripheral areas of the world still hold a sense of humour pertaining – in the two films – precisely to the specific local and regional curiosities. 

Jernej Trebežnik