INTERNATIONAL FOUND FOOTAGE COMPETITION Thursday 16 March, 20:45, Motorenhalle, Wachsbleichstraße 4a (backyard), 01067 Dresden

The winners of this year's International Found Footage Competition have been announced! It wasn't easy for the jury and the audience, there were hot discussions, because every film submission was an original, created from found footage like film sequences, film remnants or sounds. The jury and also the audience award was won by Jeissy Trompiz "THE SOUND OF THE TIME". The jury consisting of Danila Lipatov (experimental filmmaker whose films have been presented at numerous international film festivals), Birgit Dunkel (visual artist focusing on multimedia film, photography, performance and installation projects) and Lumír Hladík (artist of the post-war neo-avant-garde and a pioneering figure of Eastern European conceptual art of the 1970s) chose Trompiz Film with the words: "It's a very unusual and deep exploration of the legacy of sound in the history of human suffering."

In addition, the jury awarded an honorable mention for the film "EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT YOU" by Roland Denning: "It's a divine premotion of technological evolution of todays orwellian nightmare," said the three jury members.

The Audience Award of the International Found Footage Competition is sponsored by the Film Association of Saxony.

nominees  2023

Anne-Marie Bouchard – SALIN, 3:04 min, 8 mm, 2022, CAN
Formed by visual and sound loops, this work explores organic textures related to images shot in Gaspésie in 1966. My grandfather's nervous camera, combined with his fascination for certain innocuous movements, resonates with my artistic practice. An organic algae-based film creation workshop gave me the pretext to play with these images, allowing me to work with the film in an organic and ecological way, but also playful. The workshop offered by TAIS - Toronto Animated Image Society gave me the excuse and the impetus to create this short experiment. Vladimir Konic imagined during a period of confinement, a method to create and digitize a film
made from algae. The textures and colors created with these organic inks and films grabbed me. Their combination with recently digitized family archive images came about naturally. What could be more natural than combining images of Gaspésie with textures of algae? The process combines analog and digital technologies, 8mm film and organic film. The soundtrack comes from unused scraps from other projects.

Benjamin Ramírez Pérez - SUMMER HEAT AN EARLY FROST, 13:45 min, 16 mm, 2021, GER
SUMMER HEAT AN EARLY FROST originated in a research at the Sexual Representation Collection of the University of Toronto, which stores a collection of gay and queer porn magazines from the 80s and 90s that have been partly censored by customs officials. Employing processes of subjective as well as algorithmic selection and censorship, the archive is connected to a VHS Tape of the first mainstream film about the AIDS crisis and a lecture on digital infrastructures in the porn industry. Theories of Film montage and digital interface design are examined for their potential of regulating desire through algorithmic mediation.

David S. Johnson - POWER AND CORRUPTION, 4:01 min, 16 mm, 2020, CAN
This film is the result of forcefully decomposed, hacked up, used and abused 16mm found footage obtained from the film of the same title by Roman Polanski and narrated by Orson Welles. The outcome of this unique experiment presents a new film which has been edited and optically printed into a violent mash-up of sound and image. The result of which becomes a metaphor for the break down of the current social and political climate and the struggles of those who want to gain power.

Gabriele Rossi - BEYOND THE KNOWN, 1:10 min, 2022, FR
Despite and against everything, we'll climb that wall!
Beyond the known is an experimental found footage short film. It's a hybrid form, part of the archives being analog, the other digital. The film plays on the superposition of these two aesthetic registers to evoke a chronological continuity in the fight of the human being against obscurantism and dictatorships, whatever their nature is.

Jeissy Trompiz - THE SOUND OF THE TIME, 14:00 min, 2021, 16 mm, 8 mm, super 8, VEN
Nico is a sound man who listens to and records conversations of war soldiers from the past, but when he hears the voice of Andrés, a soldier who has survived several wars, a new empathy is discovered by him, so he decides to make himself heard by Andrés. Despite his attempts, Nico does not succeed, however, listening to the death of Andrés, he experiences the inhuman and the real pain in wars.

Julie Schroell - A PROPOS DE ZÜRICH, 8:42 min, 2021, 8 mm, LUX
Locked up in her new appartement in Zurich, the director discovers the city through her parent’s super 8 films shot in the city 50 years earlier. “A propos de Zurich” is a visual postcard from the director to her mother during lockdown in 2021.

Justin Clifford Rhody - POTEMKIN PIECE, 1:53 min, 35 mm, 2022, US
A collaborative deconstruction/destruction of a Battleship Potemkin 35mm trailer created through the mail during lockdown with nearly 100 participants. Each person was sent half-second long strips of the film to manipulate as they saw fit. Once returned, they were spliced together in a new sequence creating a chance-driven score from the optical soundtrack. A messy and exciting experiment in montage and cut up techniques made by a diverse cast including found footage maestro Craig Baldwin and my high school girlfriend.

Matt Hulse – SALT, 5:30 min, 2020, GB
Artist filmmaker Matt Hulse in collaboration with singer-songrwriter Sami Fitz. WIINER of the PUBLIC VOTE (Swedenborg Film Festival 2020)

Noah Weisel - A REPORT OF ONGOING RESEARCH INTO COSMIC INTRUSIONS UPON THE PARADIGM OF FATHERHOOD, 4:35 min, 16 mm, 8 mm, 2022, US
A quick, feverish examination of the psychological horror which accompanies the fathering of twins. This 4-part film conducts a survey of Material Cinema techniques, composed almost entirely from hand-manipulated 16mm and 8mm celluloid, including archival and newly shot footage, as well as direct animation.
*For programming purposes, the 4 parts can be played all together, as seen here, or the parts may be individually spread throughout a programming block or event.*
Part 1 - Mutant Parturition: Destruction of archival 16mm using live water soaking, boiling, ice bath, selective and random bleaching.
Part 2 - Deep Fugue State: Direct animation on clear and black 16mm leader using Sharpie, colored tape and scratching.
Part 3 - Unimagined Threats: Combination of techniques including India Ink, bleach and scratching on 16mm archival film and leader with newly shot, boiled Double 8mm film.
Part 4 - The Weird Must Be Explored: Still 35mm photography soaked in chemical cocktail after exposure, prior to home development.

Roland Denning - EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT YOU, 6:50 min, 2021, GB
EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT YOU examines 21st century issues of data control and social media using mid-20th century found footage and AI synthesised voices and characters.
Digital corporations assure us the information they harvest is used to deliver what we want, but is giving us what we want a form of control? Does telling us what we want to hear polarise society? Is freedom of choice anything to do with freedom? And what is the secret of making your partner smile in the morning?
The dominant model of propaganda and advertising was once that of insidious forces brain-washing us to do something we otherwise wouldn't want to do. That model is now redundant; in the current era, the anonymous algorithms of transglobal business exploit us by giving us more of what we desire.

Stefanie Weberhofer - COLOR TEST PROGRAM, 4:30 min, 2022, 35 mm, AT
The technical person responsible for the color program at ORF, Mr. Vostrowsky explains the change from black-and-white to color TV. The Interview was shot on black-and-white-film, a mistake that needed to be corrected.

Vito A. Rowlands - ENTRE LES IMAGES, 4:12 min, 16 mm, 2020, US
A young woman laments the loss of her innocence and mourns her lover as Europe is ravaged by war in the summer of 1914. "Entre Les Images" is a found footage film composed of preserved 35mm nitrate film frames from over 100 silent films, a large number of them irrevocably lost or only partially preserved, with nothing to mark their presence outside of these majestic few frames. As a whole, they represent the hopes, dreams, and promises of tumultuous times that left their scars on its media, perpetuating life and death between every frame. Putting these frames back into motion allows the audience to find new meaning in them, and invites them to get lost in the images.