HKAFF Winter 2015
20 December 2015 - Hong Kong Arthouse Film Festival Winter 2015 winners:
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Best Narrative Feature Film: Malady by Jack James. “Malady explores the boundaries of love when it is built from grief and challenged by shame, guilt and secrets. Holly is grieving after losing the only person in her life, her mother. In an attempt to escape her pain and fulfill her mother's last dying wishes she ventures out of the confines of the family home to find love. She meets Matthew, a man troubled by a secretive and obscure past. Together they find solace and begin to create something beautiful, but as time passes by and they delve deeper into each other's lives they are drawn back to Matthew's childhood home. Here they encounter Matthew's sickly mother Loralei, who attempts to destroy their mystique of love and the bonds they have tentatively made. This thrusts the loving couple into a spiraling nightmare of lies and deceit, testing their loyalty and redefining their definition of family.”
Best Documentary Feature Film: Felvidek. Caught in between by Vladislava Plancikova. “An animated documentary, dusts up long-forgotten stories of people from a Central European region, whose lives were affected by the decisions of political leaders. After World War II, thousands of people from this region were forced to leave their homes. Memories come alive.”
Best Narrative Short Film: Stegna by Konstantinos Giannakopoulos. “Thirteen unvoiced images about a family of four.”
Best Documentary Short Film: Calling Ukraine by Jean Counet. “Through a Skype call the daily life, dreams and fears of a family in Eastern-Ukraine is revealed while the bombs are falling in the background. A grandmother in Latvia phones with her sister and child who live in the war zone of Eastern-Ukraine, months without often having water and electricity. We see the traces of the war on the face of the grandmother who, like the viewer is powerless.”
Best Animated Short Film: The Forest Paper by Sipparpad Krongraksa. “This animation it all about bird who want to build her nest with straw,but he get lost in to the world that is made of paper, everybody in the city tends to focus on technologies and forget to care about our mother-nature.it cause disaster like flooding. This 3D animation symbolizes the lives of people in the city nowadays, which most of them that are likely to depend on materialism and that causes them to ignore their duty, which is to protect and support the existing of our natural resources.The main purpose of this project is to present the idea of how our mother nature could with the being harm through the use of paper.”
Best Underground Film: Head by Jon Bristol. “Performed by the Elmwood Puppets and presented as a part of the fictional 'Graveyard Gil's Midnight Thrills' late-night, B-movie public access show, the feature focuses on a group of twenty somethings on a weekend camping trip in remote New England who begin to uncover that the site of their getaway was host to a series of brutal mass murders, as their once fun vacation turns into a fight to survive.”
Best Experimental Film: O: a film shot with water lens -les amants d'eau- by Watanabe Takahiko. “This is a 5 minutes film shot entirely with a lens made of a water drop. The camera depicts the memories of a water drop and a girl who have been together all the time. The two start to overlap,and eventually the boundaries of human beings and water drops melt down, leaving the audience in the warm silence of absolute nostalgia.”
Best Music Video: Circles by Martin Cenkl. “Melancholic "Panel story" describes subjective view on life in industrial and uptown zones. We can see places between block of flats and some fabric buildings somewhere behind the city centre, which has specific genius loci. Music video has several dream or magic realism parts during the story.”
Best Hong Kong Film: Solitary by Adythia Utama. “Hong Kong through the eyes of a lonely man.”
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Official selection Winter 2015:
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Love Thy Neighbour (original title : "L'Amour de son prochain") (France) by Benoit Maestre
Imperfect Sky (U.S.) by Graham Streeter
Lucid (Turkey) by Daghan Dalgic
White Rose (South Korea) by Kang Shin Gyu
Born From Pain "Dance With The Devil" (Italy) by Inti Carboni
Invisible Spaces (Georgia) by Dea Kulumbegashvili
Mer Depré (U.S.) by Margaret Orr
Malady (U.K.) by Jack James
Staircase 2 (Hong Kong) by Stanley Ka Chung Lai
PMS: Pre-teen Monster Syndrome (U.S.) by Nathan Ludwig, Chad Farmer
Omessa (France) by Favier Charlène
The Forest Paper (Thailand) by Sipparpad Krongraksa
A farm at twilight (Belgium) by chantale Anciaux
Total Animal III (France) by Guerlotté Tristan
Dark Horse Candidate (Canada) by Liss Platt
Lila & Valentin (France) by Adrien Lhommedieu
Escapes (Spain) by Mercedes Gaspar
O: a film shot with water lens -les amants d'eau- (Japan) by Watanabe Takahiko
Nighthawks (U.S.) by Fang Ji
Lux (U.K.) by Chris Chung
Felvidek. Caught in between (Slovakia) by Vladislava Plancikova
Seen By My Eyes, Hong Kong (Hong Kong) by Francis So
Flesh to Violet (U.K.) by Tim Marchant
The soul is wandering (Belgium) by Guillaume Vandenberghe
In-between (Denmark) by Henrik Kolind
I Have Something To Tell You (Hong Kong) by Wu Linman
Hoc Est Corpus Meum (Germany) by Benjamin Zuber
The Boudoir (Canada) by David Latreille
Mamochka (Netherlands) by Eddy Van Hamersveld
Afterglow (U.S.) by Eli Linnetz
Stegna (ΣτÎγνα) (Greece) by Konstantinos Giannakopoulos
The End Of Everything As You Knew It. A Guide. (Luxembourg) by Christian Neuman
On The Horizon - Feature Film (Canada) by Pascal Payant
Kids Who Jump Off Bridges (Canada) by Zoe Neary
Remains (Israel) by Yotam Ben-David
Solitary (Indonesia) by Adythia Utama
Belching 37 (Belgium) by Kristian Van der Heyden
The colors for Leo (Spain) by Zarah Knebel
When Independence (Hong Kong) by Jaspa Tang
The Man Who Couldn´t Cry (Germany) by Natalie MacMahon
Three Incredibly Short Films by The Lenz Twinz (U.S.) by Felix Lenz, Sloane Lenz
Memory 7 Days, 3 Continents, 10 Minutes, 22 Seconds (U.S.) by Gloria Chung
Then Then Then (Canada) by Daniel Schioler
R_don't give an inch (Canada) by Anne-Marie Bouchard
Circles (Czech Republic) by Martin Cenkl
Calling Ukraine (Netherlands) by Jean Counet
Shoebox Memories (Ireland) by Jason Branagan
From Afar (Australia) by Tess Hutson
Lighter than Orange – The Legacy of Dioxin in Vietnam (Germany) by Matthias Leupold
Like A Cast Shadow (Germany) by Michael Krummenacher
The Journey of Little Red Cap inside of the Wolfs Belly (Ukraine) by Lidiya Huzhva
The Delicious Toad (Hong Kong) by Yin Wong, Phillip J Walker
Uri In The Sky (Israel) by Amir Har-Gil
Negotiating Amnesia (U.K.) by Alessandra Ferrini
"Slartibartfast" Yearnst/Marinah Janello (Not Specified) by Marinah Janello
Painting The Stars (Greece) by Yannis Christoforou
FranTick (Switzerland) by Amanda Piller
A Noodle in the Rain (U.S.) by Minki Hong
Cantonese rice (France) by ma
It's snowing (Italy) by Lu Pulici
Building Magic (U.S.) by Kal Toth
Feast in a Fallen City (U.S.) by Aron Bothman
Doll (Not Specified) by Diana Avhadieva
"I Can't Be Your Superman" by Skylar Spence (Not Specified) by Maegan Houang
New Start (Hong Kong) by Angie Palmer
Arca Archa (Canada) by Sarah El Bakkouri
Haruan: The Snakehead (Malaysia) by
Reunification (U.S.) by Alvin Tsang
Goon Gun - Pussy in the Sea (Russia) by Grigori Ermolaev
Ritmo Veraniego (Spain) by dadá
Ana (Canada) by Frederick Maheux
In The Waves (U.S.) by Ying-Fang Shen
Ludo (Faroe Islands) by Katrin Ottarsdóttir
Bardo: (U.S.) by Derek Coté
Venom Therapy (Not Specified) by Steven Murashige
Annoying (Canada) by Zoran Maslic
Lucid (Denmark) by Henrik Bjerregaard Clausen
Darker (U.S.) by Alex Torres
The sleep of the amazons (Belgium) by Berangere McNeese
The Rooster (Russia) by Alexey Nuzhny
spilling salt (Mexico) by Natalia Armienta
Head (U.S.) by Jon Bristol
鬼佬 (Ghost Man) (Hong Kong) by Matthew Victor Pastor
Melani (Greece) by Giorgos Efthimiou
Paolos Dream (Greece) by Kirineos Papadimatos, Giannis Avramopoulos
Locker X (Germany) by Brian May
Just talking to her (South Korea) by Euiyoung Lim
The Queer (Hong Kong) by Kwok Chung Yee Freya
Silent Lips (Sweden) by Carl Abrahamsson
Golfville (Hong Kong) by Qiu Sheng
Karma (U.S.) by Hudson Bloom
Buffalo (U.S.) by Michael McCallum
The Escape (Switzerland) by Sami Arpa
Burn Out Love (Germany) by Joachim Glaser
Rain Lotus (China) by Joe Chang
Artspeak (U.S.) by Bill Claps
Online (Croatia) by Arijana Lekić- Fridrih
Up This Hill (U.S.) by Paul Sobota
Locked (Germany) by René de Sans, Mamana
Frisky (U.S.) by Claudia Pickering
Simple Little Lives (U.S.) by Shoja Azari
The Lobster Kid (Taiwan) by Joseph Chen-Chieh Hsu
Snow (U.K.) by Washington Buckley
Still (U.S.) by Peyton Momberger
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