Fiction and Documentary
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
Every story has its own appropriate length. It is a fact that a short film can often also be too long. It is also a fact that, despite their name, there is a trend for longer narrative styles in short films too. For the international competition for short feature and documentary films, “Fiction and Documentary”, this means that in 2011, despite receiving more than twice the amount of entries in comparison to last year, in the end fewer films made it into the final selection than in the year before. 29 short films from 18 countries are up against each other for the Vienna Short Film Award (worth 4.000 Euro, founded by the City of Vienna). For this category alone almost 2.000 films from 90 countries were entered.
The international jury is not just responsible for finding a main winner from the five short film programmes, but also nominates a female film maker for the Elfi von Dassanowsky Prize, worth 500 Euro and awarded for the second time this year. The prize was founded by the eponymous foundation in memory of the legendary Austrian Hollywood producer and artist. The audience decides the winner for the Citroën Audience Award, worth 1.000 Euro.
Jury: Ruth Jarman (UK), Danny Krausz (A), Thomas Neuhauser (D).
Fiction and Documentary 1
27 May 2011, 8 p.m., Metro Kino
Wagging tongues, enticing flowers and emotions that, if need be, are squeezed out with the aid of onions: the first competition programme for short feature and documentary films is all about interpersonal confusion, emotions and desires, great expectations and arduous pathways. Six films from Canada, the USA, Germany, France, Finland and Switzerland, including the latest winner of the Sundance and Clermont-Ferrand festivals, pose the pop-song-like question: Oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, when are you coming?
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Fiction and Documentary 2
28 May 2011, 10 p.m., Metro Kino
This programme is not for the faint hearted: genre connoisseurs can look forward to contract killers, psycho games and horror fantasies; as ever, Jack Nicholson, Jon Voight and Danny Trejo are pretty cool customers in their supporting roles. Six films from Belgium, Italy, Australia, Canada, Poland and France make up the second competition programme and make the blood freeze ever so gradually – even when things don’t always turn out to be what they seem at first glance.
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Fiction and Documentary 3
29 May 2011, 6 p.m., Metro Kino
Questions of responsibility, upbringing and family organization provide the subject for fiction and documentary in the third programme in the competition. Five films from Canada, the United Kingdom, Zambia, Italy and Switzerland look at the construction and deconstruction of friendly relationships, family ties and authoritarian influence from very different perspectives – from the documentary or performative viewpoint to the surreal, warped grotesque. Who is the stranger here?
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Fiction and Documentary 4
30 May 2011, 8 p.m., Metro Kino
Get up, work, battle your way through: the daily work in the charcoal plant in one’s own garden or in a commercial kitchen in Tehran, and berry-picking day labourers in the far North. And when life becomes that bit weirder, you find yourself on board a container ship on the way to China. Six films from Finland, Poland, Germany, South Africa and Austria look at the daily grind and the day-to-day vagrancy between the (working) world’s light and dark sides.
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Fiction and Documentary 5
31 May 2011, 10 p.m., Metro Kino
Often questions we ask others are really directed to ourselves. And some of the resulting answers take some dealing with! In the fifth competition programme six films from Germany, Belgium, Georgia, Israel, Iran and China broach the difficult subjects of freedom, self determination and identity – sometimes in a haunting and pensive manner, at other times emotional or full of suspense and political intention.
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