The International Competition
The Last Bet – BEST EDITING
Director & Screenwriter: Meike Wüstenberg
Editor: Lucas Lörch
The Jury’s Comment: This film’s editing demonstrates a masterful sense of rhythm, combining precise pacing with subtle, well-timed humor. Each cut feels deliberate, with scenes ending at exactly the right moment — creating a flow that is both engaging and impactful throughout.
Skin on Skin – BEST FILM
Director& Screenwriters: Simon Schneckenburger
The Jury’s Comment: “Director Simon Schneckenburger presents a bold and mature vision, blending raw intimacy with sharp social critique. Through striking visuals and mesmerizing performances, he crafts a powerful story where fragile tenderness manages to endure within institutionalized cruelty. This combination makes Skin on Skin an unforgettable and award-worthy work.”
Our Own Shadow- MOST PROMISING DIRECTOR
Director & Screenwriter: Agustina Sanchez Gavier
Jury Statement: In a landscape marked by ancestral land and indigenous struggles, deforestation becomes both a threat and a metaphor. Through haunting imagery and an immersive soundscape, the film’s atmospheric precision and narrative depth mark the arrival of a truly promising filmmaker.
Balkan, Baby – BEST SCREENPLAY
Screenwriters: Boris Gavrilović, Laura Lybaschenko, Ecem Calisir
Director: Boris Gavrilović
The Jury’s Comment: Balkan Baby is a deeply moving film that places at its center an unforgettable character, through whom it explores the complexities of identity in a way that is both powerful and profoundly relatable.
– BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Director & Screenwriter: Gabriele Manzoni
Cinematographer: Elisa Fioritto
The Jury’s Comment: Phantom is a powerful and deeply moving film that, through brilliant cinematography, crafts a precise portrait of place and weaves together every layer of its artistry into a suspenseful and striking viewing experience.
The Risk of Childhood- HONORABLE MENTION FOR FIRST FILM
Director & Screenwriter: Luis Fernando Portales Ruiz
The Jury’s Comment: The Risk Of Childhood is a luminous meditation on absence, memory, and the shaping of identity. Luis Fernando Portales Ruiz transforms intimate, personal experiences into a universally resonant portrait of childhood, where loss and longing coexist with wonder, connection, and the subtle, enduring power of human presence.
The Truck- HONORABLE MENTION
Director, Screenwriter & Editor: Elizabeth Rao
The Jury’s Comment: What starts as a sweet and youthful love story leads to a traumatic situation that embodies the dangers of conservatism and racism in the United States today. Beautifully directed, shot, edited, and acted.
The Need of a Witness- HONORABLE MENTION
Directors: Mariana Sanguinetti, Renzo Cozza
Screenwriters: Mariana Sanguinetti
The Jury’s Comment: For daring to craft a peculiar gem of a film and an hommage to quirky humans.
The International Experimental Film & Video Art Competition
Amphibolos Lithos- BEST PROJECT
Director, Producer & Screenwriter: Valery Grysha
The Jury’s Comment: A violent bloom of fire, tectonic plates, ballistics pathways, futuristic techno-poetics which is abstract and concrete at the same time. In a cohesive cinematic language, the film sews together powerful images, technologies of vision and visions of war, into a compelling image. An ongoing state of existential apocalypse.
Little Boney and his Winter Extinguisher (at last!)- HONORABLE MENTION
Director, Screenwriter & Producer: Jonathan Omer Mizrahi
The Jury’s Comment: The film focuses our attention on an ancillary military product—a heating bag activated by the blending of its components. Mixing notions of warmth, coldness, violence, and solace, the heating bag transforms into a charged metaphor. The work touches the exposed nerves and edges of contemporary reality.