Blue Danube Film Festival

For its fearless approach on the ambiguous and complex relationship with our female body; on the conflictual love between mother and daughter and for the mesmerising and unrestrained watercolour animation. (Camila Kater - Jury)

The film ingeniously uses recordings of in-game NPCs, capturing the monotonous routines of a select few out of thousands within the virtual world. The film skillfully navigates the delicate balance between humor and seriousness, combining the inherent playful unseriousness of recording a video game with excellent narration and beautiful shots. In Hardly Working, the creators, Total Refusal highlights the overlooked artistry of in-game animation, a design that we often take for granted, while framing it as an analogy of our day to day life, creating a powerful, thought-provoking experience. (Eszter Sorosi - Student Jury)

The film is the story of the search, the contact with a distant world. His lyrical-meditative voice indirectly reflects on the dramatic event affecting our current world, the Ukrainian war. Its design world uses the visuality of the well-known and used Google Map in a very original way: the images are both concrete and dream-like, familiar and eerie - like what Mariupol means to us today. (Gábor Gelencsér - Jury)

A visually and technically stunning, playful and inventive processing of Abdi’s past, from his childhood in the war-torn Somalia, to his emigration to the Netherlands. The journey of a man, who's seen nothing but violence, but still managed to find a new life through trials and tribulations. (Jutka Szokol - Student Jury)

Amnion's strength is in its lightness of touch with relation to its thematic material. This gives the work a gentle intimacy with its materials that nonetheless steadfastly gestures to its darker concerns. Its structural arc is at once subtle, yet profound. (Richard Tuohy - Jury)

For it's ironic and profound approach to historical time, nostalgia, simulation and not at least, for it's witty apprehension to the transfiguration of art and narrativity in the density of mediaconvergence. Bowman's film are made in a manner of Bruce Conner's and the Bay Area greatest cinematic works with it's apocalyptic-epilogical overtone, startling humour and witty insights to the present. Now, this - and a whole tradition, the whole history - is the material of Bowman's film, it could be said one section of a closed museum that is already lively only as rememberance. (Mihály Horváth. Róbert Fekete - Student Jury)

In 'Affricate', the filmmaker miraculously succeeds in interweaving many different themes - motherhood, womanhood, teenage angst, living with disability... -, that in any other short film would have been one too many. She gently challenges our preconceived ideas, and always with finesse; and although running on the longer side, not a single moment is wasted and every single beat rings true. (Noemie Nakai - Jury)

It builds up tension and suspense with an extremely simple narrative device, and it was a wonderful reminder that sometimes restraint and effortlessness can lead to marvelous results. (Noemie Nakai - Jury)

The characters are really alive and lovable, which is special for such a short playing time. He takes advantage of the opportunities provided by the film and easily switches between styles, which is not a startling factor at all, rather it makes the experience more intimate and personal. The visuals, acting management, sound and editing are extremely conscious and uniform. A work full of love and sincerity. Fairytale, yet very real, it touches you.(Lili Tóth - Student Jury)

The story of the reunion of a young adult and an adolescent half-brother is not psychologizing, but at the same time unfolds from a simple story and situations, a deep, complex and haunting story. The formulation of their relationship at the climax of the film is an outstanding cinematic moment in a spontaneous dance: the volatile miracle of freedom, of finding each other and oneself for a short time. (Gábor Gelencsér - Jury)

A beautiful take on seeking forgiveness for the unforgivable. Original images with emotional and surprising storytelling.​ (András Gál - Student Jury)

A social panorama unfolding from an ordinary situation about the discrimination of strangers in an environment that considers itself democratic and liberal. The movie manages to formulate this complex issue in a most simplified, puritanical manner, making it powerful and providing some food for thought as well.(Gábor Gelencsér - Jury)

Brian Ratigan's uncanny found footage shortfilm evokes the dadaist-surrealist exquisite corpse aesthetic and repurposes it with the discrepant cinema of lettrist film saboteurs, Maurice Lemaitre and Isidore Isou, and with the rigorousity of conceptual art and structural filmmaking. The non-film - as the director refers to his own work - refutes the classical codes of narrative commercial cinema, indeed the entire cinematic establisment in order to expand the medium's possibilities and the limits of representation. The eerie qualities of The Body Appeares at the Lake Today are derives from these aspirations; the non-film is the absence and the excess of hegemonic audivisual standards at the same time, the permanent de- and restructuring of it. The ghostly, recurrent presence of the body in the title that never be found echoing these subverted standards, which is floating somewhere between the fissures of the medium. (Mihály Horváth, Róbert Fekete - Student Jury)