Still Working by Julietta Korbel, Community Gardens by Vytautas Katkus, and How to Disappear by Total Refusal collective are the winners of the New Holland International Debut Film Festival's Shorts Competition. The three films have won equal prizes for Best Short. The international jury has also awarded a Special Mention to Perdikaki by Catriona Gallagher. Garage Screen will host the Moscow premiere of these works.
Still Working
An inspector arrives at a power plant inhabited only by the guard Pavel and a dog, and with that, the former life of the place comes to an end. This Chekhovian drama is told through minimal expressive means: the protagonist is as restrained as a samurai, and the director Julietta Korbel is inclined towards static compositions and a spare color palette (the film consists almost entirely of grey and red tones). The rejection of formal excess emphasizes the hidden emotion of the story.
Still Working
Director Julietta Korbel
Switzerland, 2019. 17 min. 12+
Community Gardens / Kolektyviniai sodai
A grown-up son goes on a countryside trip with his aging parents in the hopes of reigniting the relationship, but there is nothing left to reignite. This story of familial dysfunction is set against the picturesque backdrop of a dacha community (instantly recognizable to every post-Soviet native), rendered by Vytautas Katkus with irony and a rare sympathy for his hapless subjects.
Community Gardens / Kolektyviniai sodai
Director Vytautas Katkus
Lithuania, 2019. 15 min. 16+
How to Disappear
Is it possible to desert in a shooting game? Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, and Michael Stumpf consider this question in How to Disappear, their reflection on war and games, discipline and insubordination. Shot in the picturesque military landscapes of online shooter Battlefield V, hyperreal graphics become the backdrop for an essay-like narrative. A poignant, Harun Farocki-inspired critical inquiry into—and via—state-of-the-art commercial entertainment.
How to Disappear
Directors Total Refusal (Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf)
Austria, 2020, 21 min. 12+
Perdikaki
A poetic journey through the concrete cityscape of Athens in search of a mystery that may not exist, though the journey is no less real for it. Catriona Gallagher has a rare attentiveness to the environment: few directors, even those working in the travelogue essay genre, would be able to build an entire film around the search for an urban weed that everyone has seen but no one knows the name of. Here, poems, as Akhmatova wrote, grow shamelessly in trash.
Perdikaki
Director Catriona Gallagher
Greece, United Kingdom, 2019. 37 min. 12+
The films will be screened in English, French and Lithuanian languages with Russian subtitles.