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Audience Award
WiLD – MiDO (feat. Nadim)
Director: dreifarbenpanda

Honorary Mention
Levin Goes Lightly – Flirren
Director: Florian Siegert

Meandering between digital HD and analogue VHS aesthetics, the director Florian Siegert stages a performance of two actors to the synthetic sounds of Levin Goes Lightly. The dancers move - at times synchronous, at times approaching - through pinkish fog and merge into a whirring and wafting amalgam that leaves gender attributions behind.

1st Prize
Yum Yum Club – Heute nicht raus!
Director: Marius Schwingel

The Song "Heute nicht raus" directs the attention to a protagonist who is on the fringes of Stuttgart's nightlife. The driver of a cleaning vehicle roams around Königstraße catching fragments of homeless and partying people at the edges of his sight field. With this unique documentary take the director Marius Schwingel - also part of the collective Yum Yum Club - distances himself from a strict adaption of subcultural codes, which still applies to the majority of music videos. Schwingel skillfully takes on the multi-perspective viewing possibilities of the worker as well as the monstrous utility vehicle without the voyeuristic angle. Given the Corona-induced cleaning and disinfecting measures, the wish for an aseptic, dirt-ridden city centre seems like a symbolic act portraying society's fear of the invisible.

Honorary Mention
Deep Waters
Director: Islam Elnebishy

We glance at a clear sky, a deep blue. Hands slide into the picture, followed by individual body parts and eventually a whole body dancing around us and above us. It's a play with the framing - the visible and the invisible - accompanied by a wonderful soundtrack. A film celebrating motion and dance encouraging us to take a fresh view on the world from an unusual perspective.

Winner 2 Minutes Short Film Award 2022
Bleiwüste
Director: Vera Sebert

In her video work "Bleiwüste", artist Vera Sebert explores the borders between words in writing, visual language, and digital sound and thereby depicts the reciprocal effects of the individual elements in an impressive way. The simplicity and clearness of the two-dimensional b/w images render a descriptive way of capturing the text's content: the individual "heavy" words literally collapse in front of the eyes of the viewer who is encouraged to put the digital word debris back together in a new and analogue manner and according to the pre-set rhythm. Sebert's work is a virtual experimental space stimulating the viewer to re-think things.

Two honorary mentions:

Land of Glory (Pannónia Dicsérete)
Director: Borbála Nagy

A dark analysis of incorporated behaviour by people living today inside a Hungary soaked in pathetic nationalism and obedience. A country on the verge of fascism. Its super funny and tragic. There is barely emotion or rather expression, but lots of repressed desperation, open contempt and indifference. One can look for hope in the youths lack of identification. It´s a comedy with a pacificatory end, that leaves one rather unquiet than calm.

“Bant”
Director: Zeynep Ece Elcin Yılmaz

In a kind of reversal strategy we see in this stoic stop-animated dance by Margarita Kosareva, that the more we tape, cover and delete the nude female body, the more violent images from the past break through it as an image-skin-disease projected onto it from the inside. The dancer, without any facial expression, exorcises herself into an almost blackness, leaving Flickrs of female screams behind. Although the images are from 70s and 80s Turkish TV, the film connects to a legacy of feminism that knows of the omnipresence of those images and the acts they perform on all spectators.

Team-Work-Award:
“Blastogenesis X”
Director: Conrad Veit and Charlotte Maria Kätzl

The film shows us a dream of a past that existed, that needs to be continued. A warm-hearted film in desert landscape and with impressive, righteous acting by Charlotte Maria Kätzl. Existential and queer joy!
Nude people-animals or animal-people reproducing. A hybrid artist-film, dilettante in the best way. Fantastic and playful object-costumes design. A phantasy search for a non-binary future-past where we can hope to laugh more and better in freedom. A safe space? outer space? The noisy sonic landscape contribute with a harsh edge to the image.
Blastogenesis X is convincing with a sense of punk attitude behind a clear-cut edit, and we can see an extraordinary collaboration between Kätzl and Veit.

Norman Award: Spilt equally between two films

“One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean”
Director: Wang Yuyan

The film confronts us with an insane oceanic anti-oceanic feeling of unbearable urgency. There is no more safety, there is no place to hide, there is no more turning your head and finding escape or utopia. A collapse of our almost pathological need for footage and information and news that becomes a form of static terror. Dissolution in the mass, suffocation, fluidity of the ornament, destruction, penetration, osmosis as justice as an entropic endgame, as death. Cells, fibres, growth, grow back, grow back in time. Or like Anohni sings in “Cripple and Starfish”: And I sighed and bleeded like a windfall, happy bleedy, happy bruisy. I am very happy, so please hit me. I am very very happy, so come on hurt me. I'll grow back like a Starfish. Or like the machine stuttering voice is non-articulating in the film itself: “You had this look on your face of like, I don’t know, misery maybe, ….”

“KLITCLIQUE - Zu Zweit”
Director: Anna Spanlang & KLITCLIQUE

Low tech-energy attack, Cross-fading male worlds, deforming and destroying male presence and their need to be erotically served by sexy and willing female duos, overwriting a dominant narration of power and pornography, deleting the visual litter pollution of the oppression against the female. Insisting with humor and clumsiness and great punk-dada-hip-hop-lyrics that a post-phallocratic future is already here where those objects of male power and violence are ceramic relics of the past. A pair of a-synchron rotating mirror displays show those objects that look like traumatic forms done in art-therapy while in rehab, a long time ago. Dreams from the past. “No matter where you are: Suck My Clit”.
Killjoy at its best _ feminist rap encouraging on all sides, at all stages. A kick!

Another Awaiting Stone
Director: Kanthy Peng

Our film winner questions the perspective on traditional stories with the help of performative elements. In making a system dominated by men its subject, the film hits the nerve of this year's festival edition.

We are very happy to award Wand 5's honorary prize to "Another Awaiting Stone" by Kanthy Peng. Congratulations!

Expanded Media Award 2022
Category: Media in Space
Den of Wolves, Jonathan Monaghan

A quasi-mythical journey that leads viewers to an acrylic labyrinth. Beyond the candy-coated sceneries, the sweet plastic landscape hauntingly reminded us the dark reality of the technocratic-theocracy that is hovering above us.

The real pictures of the storm of the Capitol in January 2021, burned into our collective memories as a clear crossing of borders are interpreted, contested and overwritten in this work using artistic means. With ceremonial slowness we observe the way of three wolves, collecting and carrying royal symbols (cloak, apple and scepter) between smooth candy- colored surfaces of the 3rd places (airport, apple store, coffee shop), all deserted and possibly interchangeable to the center of power.

The jurors are impressed by the expressive use of iconography in the work, creating strong and evocative associations that are relevant and timely, developing and delivering episodic stories that are open for interpretation and without easy narrative closures. The installed version, with the projection on a larger screen in a physical space, also adds an uncanny quality to the viewing experience of the work, creating an intimate and yet bigger-than-life feeling that echoes with the synthetic landscape in the video.

Expanded Media Award 2022
Category: Network Culture
Falling, Sandrine Deumier

“Falling” is a study of collapse both literally and allegorically. Making creative use of 360 degree video, and drawing inspirations from network culture, it constructs an open fantastic space that confronts viewers with a series of enigmatic falling of mannequin-like female figures or female read cyborgs in the midst of a minimal monochromatic wasteland. Why are they falling? What are they falling from? These are some of the questions that one cannot help but ask while immersing oneself within the soundless panorama.

With a constant change of scale and perspective in relation to the falling figures in the virtual world, viewers are continuously being subject to and challenged by a sliding position and shifting attitude, creating a perplexing and yet poetic experience that oscillates between skepticism and spatial disorientation. The work invites us to dive into techno-feminist speculations, to construct or critically re-question them. It has the power of a narrative engine.