Cutting-edge filmmaking

As every september in the last few years, I have participated in the XVI International Film Students Meeting during the San Sebastian film festival. Due to the collaboration between the film festival Orona Fundazioa and Mondragon University, I have coordinated a students jury composed by five students from our University that had to give the Orona Award to the most innovative short film in competition.

This students meeting is getting bigger and bigger every year as the festival tries to find and promote new talents from all over the world. We enjoyed of 5 days of programming the 14 short films in competition with Q&As with each film crew invited to the festival, and attended one master class every day by great filmmakers attending the film festival like Raymon Depardon, Todd Haynes and his producer Christine Vachon...

It's great to discover this new filmmakers every year, the selection has been made this time in between more than 200 short films and I usually find more interesting filmic experiences and voices in these short films than in the feature films of the main film festival happening at the same time in Donostia.

The big challenge in the work of coordinating this jury that gives the price to the most cutting-edge short film is to find the definition of what is to be innovative in filmmaking today between the members of the jury. I trie to open their mind to every possibility of the definition of the word... You can innovative by the way you work with your characters, the way you edit, the way you use the sound, the way you cut the story, the way you break the rules... or everything at the same time, and finally making a compelling film.

This time we decided to give the Orona Award to the short film "Zeit der unruhe", by Elsa Rosengren from the Berlin Film Conservatory DFFB. A brilliant satirical film that breaks the rules of the usual news broadcast bringing it to the streets of Berlin with non profesional actors.

I personally also loved the great cinematography of Ines de Lima's 'De madrugada" (Portugal), the acting of the grandmother of the director Martina Juncadella (Argentine) in "Fiora", the wilderness of the catalan "L'home llop" by Lluís Sellarés (Spain), the return of the dead to life in Grigory Kolomitsev's "I'm staying" (Russia), the aerial images by Sylvain Cruiziat and Mila Zhluktenko in "Find, Fix, Finish" and the spirit of Apicahtpong Weerasethakul in the colombian woods directed by Juanita Onzaga in "The jungle knows you better than you do" (Belgium-Colombia).


L'HOME LLOP (Trailer) from Lluís Sellarès on Vimeo.


THE JUNGLE KNOWS YOU BETTER THAN YOU DO - trailer ENG from Juanita Onzaga on Vimeo.