COWBOYS & COMMUNISTS CAPTURE THE 24TH KASSEL DOKFEST

The 24th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival ended with a grand finale on Sunday. 8,616 visitors came to the various festival sections. 5,754 saw the 235 films and videos and 1,500 visited the 16 media installations in the exhibition MONITORING. The festival within the festival, SPLICE IN, which premiered in Kassel before moving to Berlin, Hamburg and Kabul received special attention. In addition to the screenings, the DokfestLounge presented an audiovisual performance program.

After the presentation of films from Kunsthochschule Kassel, the culmination of this year’s festival was the presentation of the four awards in the FINALE.

The Golden Key, the award for an outstanding documentary work of a young director, donated by the city of Kassel and amounting to a current value of 5,000 Euro, was awarded to Jess Feast from New Zealand for her film COWBOYS & COMMUNISTS which tells about the cultural clash around the whimsical underground bar “White Trash Fast Food” in Berlin. The jury pronounced the film to be “entertaining, thrilling, and of great lightness without ever slipping into the banal.”

The Golden Hercules, donated by the newspaper HNA that awards the best regional work with 2,500 Euro went to MARLA by Marta Malowanczyk. The Jury acclaimed the story of a self-discovery for its “unconventional and original narrative form.”

The media installation PUBLIC FIGURES by Erik Olofsen "which literally visualizes what remains indiscernible to our limited perception" was awarded the Golden Cube (2,500 Euro), sponsored by Micromata GmbH.

An honorary mention was received by the work ZONE*INTERDITE by Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud, “which uses the options of the world wide web, to fill in the blind spots on the world map.”

The A38–Production Grant went to Daniela Rusnokova for her documentary SONA AND HER FAMILY which approaches the protagonist Sona, a mother of 14 children, with “minimal means and untainted narrative”. The reward is endowed with 4,000 Euro for living expenses and production costs plus an equivalent of 4,000 Euro for material support and the usage of technical equipment.