Winners of the 31st Hamburg International ShortFilmFestival (ISFF)

Short Films, High Art, and Plenty of Children in the Cinema

The winners of the 31st Hamburg International ShortFilmFestival (ISFF) and of the 17. Mo&Friese Children’s ShortFilmFestival

A solemn award ceremony crowned the end of 31. International ShortFilmFestival Hamburg (IKFF) on Sunday evening.

The top prize – the Hamburg Short Film Award in the International Competition – went to the Canadian filmmaker Alexandre Larose for his film ›Brouillard – Passage #14‹. The five members of the jury especially appreciated Larose “for his message how beautiful film can be.” This experience can only fully conveyed to the audience if the film, with its landscape of colors and light, is screened as analog 35 mm copy, the jury emphasized.

Thanks to the hospitality of the Hamburg short film fans, who opened their apartments particularly in Altona, Ottensen and Bahrenfeld, we were able to accommodate the enormous amount of around 550 film professionals. 150 filmmakers from more than 25 countries attended the festival, and more than 50 different film festivals from around the world had sent their representatives. Our events for experts, our panels, and our Short Film Sessions on financing, distribution, medial representation and networking – organized for the first time – have been embraced enthusiastically which highlights the significance of the IKFF as one of the world’s most important venues for the short film industry.

More than 150 team members made the festival, that presented more than 100 events, possible. We were able to increase the total number of visitors to more than 16.000 moviegoers, also due to the five highly attended Open-Air-Screenings (more than 2500 visitors, 1200 of them participating in the short film walk “A Wall Is A Screen”). We thus could once again proof that we are not only a festival for the industry, but also for the curious short film audience.

The festival center at the Kolbenhof (Bahrenfeld) invited our audience to stroll around the former industrial site. The festival area was also a truly perfect setting for the artistic interventions with which the Berlin based artist duo Wermke/Leinkauf appropriates public space. The artists’ three installations and seven peepholes revealing further video pieces were celebrated places for looking, marveling, discovering, dwelling, and reflecting.

Wermke/Leinkauf convinced not only with their design of the festival area. They also won the audience award of the International/German competition as well as the jury award of the German competition for their short film ›Symbolic Threats‹ documenting the duo’s flag swap on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Our Festival logo, the IKFF typeface on white background, inspired numerous guests to create artistic additions; and many helpers performed the festival trailer as a live and each time unique shadow play with their hands in front of the projector.

At the award ceremony, next year’s subject for the ›Three Minute Quickie‹ was announced as well. It’s: ›Switching off‹. We are looking forward to films of three minutes or less about the subject. The deadline is 1 April 2016.

The 17th Mo&Friese Children’s ShortFilmFestival (32 events in total) was the first cinema experience for many children aged four to five years. There were many amazing and lively talks in which the children posed many questions to the 35 filmmakers who attended the screenings of their films. The festival offered children many opportunities to get to know the world of film and to be actively involved in the festival, for instance as jury members or participants in the several film workshops.