JURY DECLARATION:

“The Great Basin” works as a moving quilt of the great tragic epic disaster that is western culture. Woven in such a way that pulls up a mirror to the greed and pettiness that brought us all to the brink of destruction, while never underselling the fact that we only strive to feel less alone.

JURY DECLARATION:

„Forests“ works as a voyage to the underworld. All mythologies have that: a quiet place, dark, calm, surreal, where the dead rests but sometimes can be called to enlighten and teach the living. But in „Forests“, the dead are an idea of home, a lost place where the Innu localize their stories, never to be experimented again. Such a place really exists, an ancient site submerged under the waters of a modern dam. We start in the dark, swim over an eerie forest with ghostly branches and floating tales, and end with the roaring noise of the Erebus exit, perhaps the dam intake or rebirth itself. Wonderful!

JURY DECLARATION:

“Audiocopter” is a beautiful piece that defies any attempt at definition. Art, culture, modernity, tradition, humanity and nature, all come together in an singular, unique and mysterious experience.

JURY DECLARATION:

Racing across the long Louisianan highways, the split screen allows for several different perspectives, paces and locations at once, the viewer immediately gets dizzy. This is the tempo that directors Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran set for their short film Cancer Alley, but the message hits even more profoundly. Towering along the streets are chemical plants and oil refineries, an ever-increasing crescendo of pollution, death and illness. Illnesses that befall the poor and marginalized in the communities close to them, but the movie thankfully opts not to show them. It is a drastic tour de force of looming threat, a painful reminder of how as humans we sacrifice each other to make a profit.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT:

Our newest collaboration with renowned poet Lucy English combines footage shot on location in Cancer Alley with images of nature, especially cypress groves, which are as fragile and as threatened as the Cancer Alley communities. The visuals are accompanied by a poem about what it is like to live in the small towns near the Mississippi River, between East Baton Rouge and New Orleans, which are now dominated by more than 200 chemical plants and oil refineries, sometimes literally located in residents' back yards. The cypress trees can live for more than 1000 years, if they are not chopped down for cypress mulch or their habitat destroyed. Human lifespans are much shorter, but we may not survive as a species unless we stop living as if all that matters is today, and learn to think on the time scale of the trees. Experimental and poetic strategies combine with an evocative soundscape to create a visceral depiction of one of the most polluted places on the earth.
We are honored to receive another Edward Snowden Award for “Cancer Alley,” this time from the 8th Festival Internacional Signos da Noite - Lisbon.
We rely on adventurous and divergent festivals to reach an audience for our work, and we hope this festival will continue to thrive and grow.

JURY DECLARATION:

The Jury Award is declared for a new take in the theme humanity vs nature. In nature, extinctions are natural events, either as result of slow changes or catastrophic events. The current great extinction event can be seen as being as natural, as humans are natural beings. All possible outcomes are natural, even complete termination of life on Earth. But humanity positions itself outside nature. It demands intent, moral choices and desirable futures in discussing its relation to the wild nature. Nature is mostly deaf and mute to that dialog but,... what if it could participate in it using human language? That's the original idea behind Eviction, showing retreating ecosystems in the world, complaining with a powerful narrator voice that they are being evicted from their homes. We can relate with that.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT:

This video was more than three years in the making. I originally had the idea to give voice to the tiny unseen creatures that live in the undergrowth and which are often in great danger from habitat destruction. But as the work came together, I realised that the plants were the key to the sustainable nature of the environment. Without them, no animal life can exist. Many of these scenes in the video are composited from multiple elements, most of which were filmed in my own garden, using pieces of electronic junk I had lying around our house: parts of a printer, a coffee machine, an amplifier and so on. In considering potentially future forms of plant life that could survive human interference, I animated some imaginary plant-like organisms for some scenes. Thank you to the Jury for recognising this work, and thank you to the Festival for supporting work that I hope helps to challenge the way we interact with the world and each other.