Scott Miller Berry, lead programmer of Toronto's Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival and a long-time collaborator of Goethe-Instituts from Toronto to Jakarta to Bangalore, attended the 68th Oberhausen Short Film Festival, the festival's first in-person edition since 2019. German Film @ Canada asked him to report back on highlights and critical takeaways in a 2-part festival report:
I've lost track of how many times I've been fortunate to visit the venerable
Oberhausen Short Film Festival near Dusseldorf in the west of West Germany, but I believe the first visit was in 2007 or 2008. This year felt more special than most because it was their first edition back in the beautiful Lichtburg Cinema since 2019, following two exclusively
online festivals. In 2020 the festival was planning a large
focus on Canadian creators with a series of live celluloid film-based performances, a 16mm handmade film workshop from the
Film Farm (Philip Hoffman’s independent imaging retreat in Ontario), book launches, talks and presence from dozens of artists from across so-called Canada.
To the festival's credit --and the flexibility of the Canada Council for the Arts-- the funding was deferred until 2022 and this year I was fortunate to be in attendance
with Film Farm colleagues and alongside artists including Lindsay McIntyre (Vancouver), Heidi Phillips (Winnipeg), Marcos Arriaga (Toronto), Karl Lemieux (Montréal), John Price (Toronto), Ian Campbell (Regina), Alex Mackenzie (Vancouver) and others.
The excitement around finally being together again was palpable from the opening night program through to the closing awards ceremony. The festival hosted over 800 guests from 72 countries (compared with 1000+ in 2019) and everyone I met was, like me, full of gratitude and awe that the world's first and largest short film festival pulled together a hybrid event so we could all worship at the temple of short films together.
For anyone not familiar with Oberhausen, the size and scope is simultaneously incredible and overwhelming -- in 2022 alone the festival screened over 600 international short films (44 of them online exclusively). Beyond the requisite mixed bag "
Gemischtwarenladen" (read: always inconsistent) International Competition, which, in 2022 was down to 8 programs from the usual 10 with an additional 6 programs exclusively online. This splitting of international work between onsite and online is confounding to this cineaste; it makes sense in a hybrid world to reach new audiences who cannot travel with online films; what was frustrating was that filmmakers were forced to choose one platform over the other -- presumably to assist the selection process and to expedite the rights issues that can come with streaming films globally.
With almost 5,000 submissions this year (compared to 7,700 in 2019)
Oberhausen is a mammoth dive into current short film creations but let me highlight some films and sections that stood out from the slice of viewings I saw:
The opening night program is always a commitment due to the laborious speeches from local, regional and sometimes national politicians, sponsors and the festival's long standing director, Lars Henrik Gass.
The 68th opening struck a different tone, both due to the ongoing war in Ukraine but also by the intervention of climate and environmental activists who took to the stage before the mayor of Oberhausen to scold all levels of the German government for not doing enough to address climate change and in particular the extraction of trees for a local highway. Mayor Werner Nakot went on to give a passionate speech about the raging violence in Ukraine and went so far as to say "art is important for all to process their trauma."
The welcome letter from Gass in the festival catalogue was dedicated to
the festival's position against war but also vehemently against censoring works by Russian artists, quoting Nietzsche: "Everything serves the approaching barbarism; the arts as well as the sciences." In his
opening remarks Gass addressed the crisis facing arts and cultural organizations with diffuse state funding apparatuses focused on return on investment in a landscape that is more split than ever between cinemas, VOD platforms and the internet – with Gass wondering about direct models of educational viewing and asking for screening rooms in schools and retirement facilities. Linking the festival with war-torn Europe, he powerfully mentioned that
"the German military budget incurs costs equal to the budget of the (Oberhausen) Short Film Festival every 8 minutes."
On to the films in part 2...
image courtesy S. Miller Berry: "Two Times in one Space" lecture-performance by Maximillian Le Cain & Lea Lanoë
