2023 Awarded Films
First prize
Maurício Chades: Green Cemetery (Brazil, 2023, 25 minutes)
Lavina retires and buys a house in a small city in the middle of a Brazilian savanna. Not even grass would grow on the degraded soil of her backyard. So she starts to plant an agroforestry garden offering each seedling to a loved one who passed away.
Second prize
Eri Saito: May All Your Wounds Heal (Japan, 2021, 5 minutes)
We cannot feel the pain of others, though if one were to physically connect the nerves in one’s brain to another’s body, one might be able to do so. The artist’s simulated experience of this pain acts as a complex neural transmission that cannot be interpreted.
Honorable mention
Bo Wang, An Asian Ghost Story (Hong Kong/The Netherlands, 2023, 37 minutes)
This film is about haunting memories of Asia’s late twentieth-century modernization. The story departs from a 1965 United States embargo on the hair trade, known as the Communist Hair Ban. Yet, in every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past.
Shortlisted films
Alia Ardon and Safdar Ahmed, Border Farce (Australia, 2022, 15 minutes)
José Cardoso, What the Soil Remembers (Ecuador/South Africa, 2022, 29 minutes)
Sim Hahahah, Memory Playthrough (United States, 2022, 2 minutes)
Daryna Mamaisur, Smoke of the Fire (Ukraine/Portugal, 2022, 21 minutes)
Nour Ouayda, The Secret Garden (Lebanon, 2023, 27 minutes)
Riar Rizaldi, Notes from Gog Magog (Indonesia/South Korea, 2022, 19 minutes)
Tulapop Saenjaroen, Mangosteen (Thailand, 2022, 40 minutes)
Chulayarnnon Siriphol, ANG48 (Thailand/South Korea/China, 2022, 25 minutes)
Yuan Zheng, Hepingli Playthrough (China/United States, 35 minutes, 2022)
2023 Awardees
Maurício Chades is an artist and filmmaker from Brazil. He holds a BA in Cinema Studies and an MA in Art and Technology from the University of Brasilia, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has participated in collectives such as Espaço AVI, Kinofogo Cineclube, and NINHO—Collective for Research in Art, Interactivity, and Agroecology. His works, in film, installation, sculpture, and performance have speculated about symbiotic, queer, and anticolonial futures. Through fiction, he strives to blur the separations between city, countryside, and forest. Envisioning syntropic environments and multispecies alliances, his art practice combines storytelling with restorative agriculture, composting, and fungiculture. His works have been shown worldwide, including at Queer Lisbon, Curitiba International Film Festival, and FILE—Electronic Language International Festival. In 2019, he presented his first solo show, Pyramid, Urubu, at The Brasilia Digital TV Tower, receiving the Frankenthaler Climate Art Awards in 2022. Chades was featured at the Biennial Videobrasil, and is currently a visiting artist at The Metabolic Studio in Los Angeles.
Eri Saito is a Japanese visual artist living and working in Tokyo. Born 1991 in Fukushima. She graduated from the Wako University Department of Arts, Faculty of Representational Studies, in 2015. Focusing on video, Saito creates works themed on such invisible and uncertain dynamics as memory and cognition. Her recent exhibitions include WVlog: Personal (Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo, 2022), Until It Gets Dark (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 2021), Glory of 2020 (Yumi Adachi Contemporary / Awoba Soh, Tokyo, 2020), and 1GB (Spiral Hall, Tokyo, 2020). Her video works have been shown at the 40th edition of the International Festival of Films on Art—Le FIFA (Montreal, Canada, 2022), Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, 2022), Image Forum Festival (Theatre Image Forum, Tokyo, 2020), and The Movie Theater Floating on the Sea (Kanagawa, 2019), among other places.
Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Amsterdam. He holds a BS in Physics and Mathematics and an MS in Physics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Wang’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art (New York), Garage Museum (Moscow), International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Image Forum Festival (Tokyo), Visions du Réel (Nyon, Switzerland), LUX & Open City Documentary Festival (London), DMZ Docs (South Korea), and Para Site (Hong Kong), among many other places. His film An Asian Ghost Story won the New:Vision Award at CPH:DOX 2023. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residence at ACC-Rijksakademie from 2017 to 2018, as well as at NTU CCA in 2016.
2023 Jury
Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, college lecturer, and writer. He is senior staff writer of The Stranger, a lecturer at Cornish College of the Arts, and director of the feature film Thin Skin (2021).
Anri Sala employs moving images and their soundtracks to investigate historical ruptures and failures of language. Using a variety of platforms including video installation, sculpture, photography, performance, and movie scores, he weaves together personal and political narratives that explore themes of identity, displacement, migration, loss, and cultural exchange. Sala’s work has been widely presented in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. He was born in Tirana, and lives and works in Berlin.
Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her films have been the subject of special focus screenings at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto; and Harvard Film Archive. She is a co-founder of the Bangkok-based production company Electric Eel Films. In 2017, together with Visra Vichit-Vadakan and Aditya Assarat, she founded Purin Pictures, an initiative to support Southeast Asian cinema. She teaches film at Columbia University.
2023 Pre-selection Committee
Lukas Brasiskis is a curator of video and film at e-flux.
Dmitry Frolov is a curator and researcher in the field of film and video art. Since 2017 he has served as curator at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival (MIEFF), and since 2021 as curator of the film program at the Pushkin House Cultural Centre (London).
Steff Hui Ci Ling is a cultural worker, labor researcher, and occasional critic and film programmer living as a guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. She is currently organizing the circulation of an Art Workers’ Inquiry for Decolonial Potential. The Inquiry is concerned with the political tradition of workers’ inquiries and its application in the cultural sector and our labor’s relationship to settler-colonial property.