Jan 30, 2017

2017 Sundance & Slamdance Animation Winners Announced

The Sundance Film Festival and Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, have closed.

At the Sundance Film Festival, the German film "Broken-The Women's Prison at Hoheneck" by Volker Schlecht and Alexander Lahr won the Jury Prize for Best Animated Short Film. The film also won the Grand Prize at last year's Stuttgart Animation Festival. The animated documentary is based on interviews with survivors of the former East German women's prison Hoheneck. At Hoheneck, political prisoners were forced to work on both sides of the Iron Curtain in a scheme to generate huge profits.

The Sundance Short Film Competition jurors were Shirley Krata, David Lowry, and Patton Oswalt.

"Broken" was published online a few days ago on the New York Times website:

Curiously, it was not even a finalist, despite being an exemplary animated film, both graphically and in content, for this year's Academy Awards. It did not. As we noted a few days ago regarding the Cesar nominations, the Academy Award selections rarely reflect the breadth, diversity, and power of the art of animation.

At Slamdance, a more independent film festival that runs parallel to Sundance, the Sparky Award for best animated short went to Hold Me (Ca Caw Ca Caw), a graduation short by Harvard's Renee Zang.

"This is a wonderful, nuanced portrayal of power, control, and the pain this artist creates. Its honest voice found a way to share a very private moment with the perfect combination of repressed serenity." The jury that selected the award consisted of filmmaker Sonia Albert Sobrino, Jeffrey Bowers (Vimeo Senior Curator), and filmmaker Malik Vitale.

In addition, the Sparky Award for Best Experimental Short for Slamdance went to Ariana Gerstein's "Upcycles." The film began as a Super 8 film, was hand processed, printed on 16mm and 35mm, and then reprinted on 16mm. Gerstein "printed it on a DSLR via JK, including cutting and taping the film, (and) finally finishing it digitally with sound"

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"We were impressed by the unusual and meticulous process involved in the production of Upcycles. We were further affected by the fact that the process did not overshadow the pure visual pleasure of experiencing this experimental film." The experimental jury consisted of filmmaker Miriam Albert Sobrino, director Mike Orenick, and film programmer Brian Wendorf (Chicago Underground Film Festival).