The European Film Awards are the European equivalent to the American Oscars. Every year, the European Film Academy awards a prize for the best short film. 29 festivals (including Berlinale, the Venice IFF, the Locarno Film Festival, and Kurzfilmtage) submit the choices of their respective juries to the Academy. With this selection of films nominated in 2023, we are presenting some of best works of the current European short film scene.
Hardly Working
Total Refusal / Austria 2022 / 20'30" / DCP / colour / English / Exp/Doc
An ethnographic exploration of the work and life realities of non-player characters, the digital extras in video games. Their labour loops and activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.
Daydreaming So Vividly about Our Spanish Holidays
Christian Avilés / Spain 2022 / 23'34" / DCP / colour / English/Spanish / Fic
Driven by their desire for light and warmth, British teenagers take a trip to the Balearic Islands. They must absorb the sun and store it in their bodies to take it back to their cloud-covered kingdom. A surreal film about the real phenomenon of «balconing», which has led to tragic accidents in recent summers.
27
Flóra Anna Buda / France/Hungary 2023 / 10'38" / colour / Hungarian
Alice is 27 years old today. Even though she is suffocating a bit, she still lives with her parents and tends to live in her dreams to escape her dreary everyday life. After a psychedelic party on a factory roof, she has a serious drunken bike accident. Will this give her the courage to become an adult?
Aqueronte
Manuel Muñoz Rivas / Spain 2023 / 26' / DCP / colour / Spanish / Exp/Doc
On board a ferry, passengers are crossing a river. Some wrap themselves in silence and observe their fellow travelers or the scenery. Others chat. The journey on water seems to expand, and the arrival is postponed. Motion itself is perhaps the only certainty.
Flores del otro patio
Jorge Cadena / Switzerland 2022 / 15'20" / DCP / colour / Spanish / Fic
In the north of Colombia, a group of queer activists use extravagant performative action to denounce the disastrous exploitation by the country's largest coal mine.