News

Due to Corona, we - as many of our colleagues have already done - will realize our festival as an online edition. The best submissions for the International Competition, 2 Minute Shorts Competition and the recently launched new Buggles Award - Music Video Award of the Federal Land of Baden-Wuerttemberg in cooperation with Pop-Büro Stuttgart. As of 21 December, the contributions for the Buggles Award will be released and the voting for the Online Audience Award is on.

The exhibition Expanded Media with competing entries from the categories Media in Space and Network Culture will be postponed to late March 2021. The selection will be published on the Festival Website and also comprise interactive web and social web projects and interventions in public and virtual space, which already will be accessible during the online festival edition.

In the course of 2021, we are also looking forward to the Filmwinter programmes for children and youth, the continuation of the monthly series Shorties in cooperation with Fitz Theater animierter Formen and Produktionszentrum Tanz und Performance, as well as our new project "Passage" which, by way of walks with moving images, audio plays and live performances, will explore the city in new ways.

But what's even dearer to our hearts: may 2021 be the year of the cinemas! All curtains up!

Among the gems in the supporting programme we have the premiere of Emerging Artists - Contemporary Experimental Films and Video Art from Germany of AG Kurzfilm in cooperation with German Films. The interactive online reading Polyplot: Gefährliche Menschen - Exploration of possible futures through Science Fiction by Frank Rieger and Christiane Hütter in cooperation with Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart and CCCS, as well as the presentation of the continuously advancing media art project „Bottled Songs“ on terroristic online propaganda by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee.

In the framework of the festival, Media Space offers workshops on the subject of augmented reality in performative arts, the subject Deep Fakes based on designing avatars in Zoom, and a lecture on digital ethics. Together with the cooperation partner mur.at – Initiative Netzkultur, we'll talk about the change of paradigms, artistic strategies and we'll introduce open source tools by and for artists.

The festival motto „How I learned to love the Blob“ puts the body at the centre. We named it "Blob" - acting as an alterable symbol for any relationship between bodies. In these special times, we understand the festival as a process: we break through our common structures and take to a laboratory. Our field of research: How will I learn to love the Blob? How do we approach a time that feels like a mix between the cult movies "The Blob" and "Dr. Strangelove"? What do closeness, distance, and touching mean in mood marked by COVID-19? How will media art succeed in touching us or oscillate between „Touch me“ and „Don’t touch“?

We make notes of individual stops during this long trip in a notebook manufactured for exactly this purpose - our analogue notebook (Design by Demian Bern). The book comprises pictures as mandalas by the artist Mirai Mizue - an icon of animated film. For us, the dancing bodies in Mizue's works express a perspective full of hope. The bodies separate, to find themselves again. The give up their form to reappear in a new form. To give up one place in order to explore another is what we consider the courage to touch.

At www.filmwinter.de, the complete programme will be made accessible online with a fee-based festival pass. The festival pass is available for 10 euros but there's the option to pay more if you want. All further donations are transferred directly to „Künstler*innen Soforthilfe Stuttgart“ and the Initiative „Stuttgart gegen Rechts“. The items of the programme agenda will be activated according to the schedule of the festival dramaturgy and will generally be available for 48 hours.

An online festival area free of charge will feature interviews with filmmakers, film programmes of Merz Akademie and Kunstakademie Stuttgart, as well as the works of the Expanded Media exhibition.

Thank you to all our partners, supporters, colleagues, institutions and organisations, and especially our artists for their trust, to start and spend this special time with us.

In this visionary sense: "We will meet again..."