Category: winners2023

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Lotus-Eyed Girl

Director Biography – Rajee Samarasinghe
Rajee SAMARASINGHE (1988, Sri Lanka) was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. Much of his work examines sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of deconstructing ethnographic practices and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. Samarasinghe’s films have been screened at venues internationally including the Ammodo Tiger Short Competition at IFFR in 2020.
SYNOPSIS
A haunting collage of pomegranate arils, rural and urban landscapes, family history and mandalas undulate at a crossroads between death and longing. Inspired by the love poem Caurapañcāśikā by Bilhana, Lotus-Eyed Girl unfurls the impacts of colonialism on human desire with a pulsating, ambient eeriness.


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Cave Paintings

Director Biography – Siegfried A. Fruhauf
Siegfried A. FRUHAUF (1976, Austria) studied experimental visual design at the University of Art and Design in Linz. He has been experimenting with video, film and photography since 1993 and his short films have been shown at IFFR and other major film festivals, including Cannes, Venice and Sundance. In his work, Fruhauf explores the perception of cinematographic movement through the exposure and structural montage of individual film frames and photographs. In 2002, Fruhauf received the Supporting Award for Film Art from the Austrian Federal Chancellery. His most recent film Cave Painting was selected for IFFR 2023.
SYNOPSIS
It’s all the rage to evoke spectacular ‘immersive’ cinema today, but nothing matches the immersion effect of a Siegfried A. Fruhauf film. Agglomerating the textures of cave surfaces with the material traces of filmic processes, Cave Painting offers a trippy visual and sonic journey for the senses that evokes an avant-garde, grunge version of the psychedelia in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oydssey. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss something good. As always, Fruhauf conjures a new world.

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Repetitions

Director Biography – Morgan Quaintance
Morgan QUAINTANCE is a London-based artist and writer. His moving-image work has been shown widely, with presentations in 2020 including Curtas Vila Do Conje, Portugal, at which he received the Best Experimental Film award and CPH:DOX, at which he received the New Vision Award, both for the film South (2020); European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; and Images Festival, Toronto. Over the past 10 years, his incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their sociopolitical contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.
SYNOPSIS
An exercise in observing repetition, following patterns and deciphering loops. Drawing focus through the lull of recurring images and repeating sounds, a clearer image emerges of industrialised labour and the vulnerable bodies of those performing it. This film finds a rhythm, much a like a machine, to manifest the misgivings of the working class.