Festival Awards

Faces and figures emerging from the shadows. A world in search of a vanishing light. A film that manages to build its visions through darkness, struggling against the night that swallows us all to reveal what’s left of our humanity, our narratives, our poetry, our hopes.

With very precise storytelling, using just the right amount of words while paying great attention to detail in the mise-en-scène and keeping an incredibly humble narrative style, this film gets to the heart of a touching story about transience without losing its levity. Through an astonishing sense of visual narration, we are introduced to the humble rituals of a Japanese New Year's Eve, until we realize that what we are witnessing is a farewell.

The first Special Mention is for a film of the present and the future, delivered like an environmental documentary, a horror film, and a science fiction tale. A brilliant take on the dangers, possibilities, and uncanny valley of AI, with a mind-blowing aesthetic to illustrate a brave new world.

The second Special Mention is for a fascinating thriller with wonderful staging from a talented filmmaker. This exercise in style goes from social drama to romantic cinema and ends in a dazzling thriller. Both precise and surprising, with characters whose fights always end badly. With a story that keeps you glued to the seat until its fantastic finale.

A luminous short that follows two boys during their first afternoon of love. With the help of his fantastic young actors whose sensual chemistry radiates through each 16mm frame of his film, the director manages to capture the urge of desire and the exhilarating freedom you feel when someone special is entering your life.

The prize goes to a film that represents the crisis-ridden times of the present in a large animated tableau like a medieval simultaneous display. Pop culture and the world of goods, catastrophes and wars have merged inexorably. The director succeeds in addressing the failure of humanity in real time in an associative, playful and symbolic way and making the injustices and inequalities visible. A humorous, collage-like panopticon of doom!

In this film, the artist invites us into a poetic and sensual narrative using delicate lines that echo with a resonating voice. For its honest and beautifully drawn observations, our Jury Prize for the Best Newcomer goes to the film Y, by Matea Kovač.

This film manifests the exquisite tension between the distorted and the sharpened, the noise and the silence that challenges the fragile balance between nature and artificiality. For this gracefully composed sensory landscape, the Honorable Mention goes to Visions by Maxime Corbeil-Perron.

For the outstanding cinematic sensitivity and the sinuous stylistic elegance through which the director managed to transfigure a tender and melancholic coming-of-age story into an evocative nocturnal journey of discovery, the Austrian Short Film Award for Best Film goes to I saw you were dancing by Sarah Pech.

A few plastic chairs, a coffee brewing in the kitchen and a conglomerate of languages provide the backdrop for this beautifully crafted film exploring themes of family, migration, belonging and the notion of heimat—a feeling of comfort and rootedness. Speaking from a point of truth we couldn’t help but fall in love with the film’s characters. The director’s poignant and assured storytelling makes us eager to see more from them in the future.

The surreality of the giant outdoor food factory is intensified by the accompanying delicately composed sound. The mixture of the original sound with synthetic sound emphasizes the artificiality of mass food production and the impacts it has on both the environment and the humans working in the fields. The Honorable Mention for a special Artistic Achievement goes to Valley Pride and the collaboration between director Lukas Marxt and musician and artist Jung An Tagen.

The Youth Jury Prize goes to the film that thrilled us the most. This film tells the story of a summertime thing with a dash of heartache. All twelve of us were moved from the first to the last second. The emotions the film talks about are familiar to most of us, and we all agree that the execution on the big screen was spot on. On top of that, you have two amazing actors, an excellent soundtrack, and top-notch camera work. The images pull you into the story and close-up to the protagonists. We were impressed, because the film, a Film Academy production, may well have been a big-budget Netflix production.

First of all, we would like to give an Honorable Mention to the animated film Annoyance by Sascha Vernik. We've never seen the world through the eyes of a fly
before; the film is very short, action-filled, and has a great punchline.

With cinematic elegance, a striking visual language, and powerful direction, this music video tells a humorous story with a serious undertone in precise clarity. Music and video form a harmonious unit. The theme of self-optimization and the break with gender conventions are negotiated in a highly original way.

With precise artistic vision, the director plunges us into the liminal world between inside and outside. The digital de- and reconstruction of a photograph emphasizes the intensity and emotionality of the song and harmonizes with the electronic sound. The video creates its own filmic landscape and builds a fluid universe. The hypnotic, haunting visuals translate the painful memory that the song recounts into a disquieting atmosphere.

The Social Responsibility Award of the Vienna Chamber of Labor goes to a highly topical film that sheds new light on a much-discussed subject. This documentary shows us how much visualization contributes to our perception and opinion of things. The film takes us on a profound journey that goes well beyond the surface of what is portrayed in the media. It demonstrates the power of images and their role in the public debate about pregnancy termination by challenging the omnipresence of stock photos in the media and investigating their effects on our public perception. The Social Responsibility Award 2024 goes to getty abortions by Franzis Kabisch.

Due to the extraordinary selection this year, we want to make an honorable mention before we get to the main award. Memories of the Foreign by Tolga Karaaslan dazzled us in its touching, thoughtful exploration
of an important social subject. In the year of the sixtieth anniversary of the recruitment agreement between Austria and Turkey, it is
particularly striking that the film lets a voice from the first generation of guest workers be heard.

Sound design comprises both a technical aspect and a content-related artistic aspect. The technical aspect lies in the creation of original sound on set as well as its manipulation, for instance with AI programs that should serve as supportive tools in the process. The content-related artistic aspect helps to move the plot along and immerses us in the action. And this is exactly what happens in this year’s winner for Best Sound Design. The film’s plot is perfectly complemented by the sound, which is in turn delicately rendered and surprising in some scenes, helping the viewer and the listener to better understand what is happening. The sound design is well thought-out, never too much, and always inspired and inspiring. The award for Best Sound Design goes to Caroline Polke and her team for their work on I saw you were dancing by Sarah Pech.