The 71st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen featured an eclectic mix of films from around the world. Themes of history, family, labour, structures of remembering and the experiences of migration predominated in fascinating ways across films in the competition and were accompanied by a number of conceptual works, meditative introspections and animation-meets-AI experiments for which the festival is well known. Demonstrating the breadth of possibilities, modes and devices available to the short form and the perceptive filmmaker, the ‘problem of pain’ emerged as one of the common threads of the films presented in the festival and the nature of the response was explored by filmmakers coming from separate continents and vastly different backgrounds.
Headed by the International Competition further strands of this year’s festival included the International Children’s and Youth Film Competition, German Competition, NRW Competition for films from North-Rhine Westphalia and MuVi Competition for the music video. The festival also featured classic strands dedicated to film history including an East German themed retrospective that both honours the festival’s past in building bridges between neighbours and reflects the aesthetics of a town that – with its industrial legacy, brutalist architecture, and remodelled factories – very much appears like the dream world of socialist utopia. While growing an extensive online library of over 6000 films, the festival emerged from the pandemic era and returned its competitions to the cinemas of Oberhausen. The Lichtburg cinema was a special meeting point where one could encounter filmmakers, forge connections and discuss the programme.
By the time awards’ season came with the final evening of the festival, what was intriguing is that top laureates primarily included films from Eastern Europe, thereby continuing a festival tradition that endows Oberhausen with a particular history when it comes to the discovery of Yugoslav cinema and the internationalisation of film heritage from the Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary. What was also brilliant is that the number of diverse films honoured were complemented by the number of diverse juries. In addition to the established juries for each competition, the novelty of the festival included a jury formed of schoolchildren as well as youth and winners – as the hosts of the festival explained – would go on to be distributed in schools throughout and beyond the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. This approach showed a nice way of connecting the work of the festival to film education and fostering actual inclusion amongst the youngest members of the community and as such can serve as a good model for other colleagues in film.
***
The Ecumenical Jury was divided into two groups with the present report based on films viewed by the Jury of the International Competition. The Ecumenical Jury saw forty-seven films in the main competition and selected the winner and a commendation.
Dear Leo Sokolosky (Weronika Szyma)
At the 71st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen the Ecumenical Jury of INTERFILM and SIGNIS awarded its Prize to the film Dear Leo Sokolosky by Weronika Szyma (Poland, 2024). The film takes the form of an animated documentary that sees a young woman travelling to the town of Ansbach, retracing the footsteps of her great-grandfather who was imprisoned in a labour camp there during the Second World War. The film is an ever-unfolding inner dialogue between the narrator and her great-grandfather, and this is reflected visually in an original and dynamic use of film language composed of minimalist hand-drawn animation, free-form poetic movement and the dramaturgical composition of a diary. She attempts to understand what he went through, why there is no mention of the past in Ansbach today, what life would have been like if her great-grandfather decided to migrate to the United States and in that case if she were never born. The most rewarding aspect of the film is that it ‘kneels’ before the mystery and awe of the gift of life.
The film honours family, internalises history, and shows the personal recognition of suffering our closest ones had to go through for us to live. Szyma’s greatest discovery however is that the fruit of that life is by no means more pain but immeasurable love: another gift passed down and well captured by the closing sequences of live action connected by home movies from family archives. The film makes the past present and brings together history, documentary and critical personal reflection. Dear Leo Sokolosky is a wondrous cinematic work that gives us the rare opportunity to pull back the curtain and peer into the depths of a human soul.
A graduate of the Łódź Film School, Weronika Szyma is a director to watch who – following in the footsteps of Borowczyk, Lenica, Piwkoski and the great Mieczysław Waśkowski – continues the tradition of Polish experimental animation and testifies to its constant vitality. The International Competition’s “transl. it’s okay to be quiet” by Filip Jakubowski (Poland, 2025) explored a similar family theme and confirms the breadth of short filmmaking from Poland also in the realm of live action.
Nocturno (Sol Muñoz, Ana Apontes)
Moreover, the Jury awarded its Commendation to the film Nocturno by Sol Muñoz and Ana Apontes (Argentina, 2025). A film which follows two sisters walking through the night while their father works a security guard for an affluent neighbourhood becomes an invitation into the atmospheric care-free world of childhood. We follow the girls as they encounter all the troubles of adults over the course of several hours but also other children who observe them from inside lavish houses that come to resemble prisons.
The film is a delicate work of social critique. It shows us how wealth leads to isolation and how children who seem to have everything feel actually ‘locked up’ and alone. By contrast, the film depicts girls who may well be on the brink of poverty – and whose father in the background of the story works difficult night shifts for those same ménages – as actually free and using that freedom and precious time to discover the world together. Thus, the film is more than a social commentary; it is an existential reminder of what it means to live life in communion despite the tribulations that come our way.
Long Way to the Pasture (Ilgiz-Sherniiaz Tursunbek uulu) / Within the Sun (Sepideh Jamshidi Nejad)
In the process of making our decision we had a number of productive conversations on the Jury and discussed a range of films from the competition that struck us in different ways. Jailoogo Karay Uzak Jol/Long Way to the Pasture by Ilgiz-Sherniiaz Tursunbek uulu (Kyrgyzstan, 2025) – which won the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen – is a quiet human drama, a story about man’s inherent connectedness to animals and the land, and a great exploration of Kyrgyz mountains and plains. The film follows a family led by Aziz as they move their livestock on which they depend for money to the summer pastures and encounter various challenges along the way.
Naturalist, observant and slow burning in its use of film language the director shows us the terrain, the demanding physicality of the movement for the people and the prominence of sheep as characters in their own right. We encounter animals in a new light and see how great and difficult it really can be to navigate them to pasture. Far from the comforts of urban society and the self-centred dangers of artistic endeavour, this film returns us to a practical view of life, to the fruits of hard work and the vitality of human spirit required in the face of nature.
A similar work that also touches on these themes can be found in the film Baraftoo/Within the Sun by Sepideh Jamshidi Nejad (Iran, 2025). The story focuses on a salt mine in rural Iran and the very difficult day-to-day work done by none than other than a community of elderly women. The physicality of the labour is accentuated by the director’s eye for detail in breaking down the process over the thirty-minute running time of the film, thereby reinforcing the superhuman strength required of most vulnerable members in a society. It is dedicated to the director’s grandmother (the grandmother being another common key figure in many films of this year’s international competition) and symbolically the women whose contributions are great yet go unnoticed in the eyes of the world.
The Palace Sq∞are (Mikhail Zheleznikov)
Dvorts∞vaya/The Palace Sq∞are by Mikhail Zheleznikov (Israel, 2024) – winner of the festival’s Principal Prize – shows the history of the twentieth century revolving around the Alexander Column on Palace Square in St Petersburg. Making the Square a character, beginning with a contemporary photomontage and subsequently composed of archival footage the film explores key events in Russia’s history including rare footage featuring Tsar Nicholas I and the days that preceded the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet state parades, the gatherings of ordinary people at different points in time, student protests in the time of Yeltsin and many others.
The greatest features of the film can be found in its use of montage and its unexpected references to Sergei Eisenstein. In the first case, the film is almost entirely non-linear and uses archival images to compose a story that works by association rather than exposition. People observe history and the fate of the country and at the same time by virtue of association appear to ‘comment’ on it just as previously disconnected images inform one another. In the latter case, the film uses the storming of the Winter Palace from Eisenstein’s October (USSR, 1928) but encloses them within a much smaller frame and with intertitles, thereby showing that these sequences are staged. This is a refreshing contrast to both the rest of actual archival footage used in the film and a good reminder of the artifice of these images which have so often been historicised through overuse in international documentaries about the October Revolution (whereby to the viewer unfamiliar with Eisenstein they appear as authentic footage of 1917 events rather than staged sequences from a fiction film).
Common Pear (Gregor Božič)
Common Pear (Slovenia-UK, 2025) is a science fiction film directed by Gregor Božič that is composed like an archival documentary meets ecological survey. Set in the future after a climate catastrophe, a team of scientists wakes up from cryogenic sleep and analyses archival footage of farmers in order to understand their connectedness to nature (featuring conversations with an aged and experienced generation: grand-fathers and mothers from the Slovenian countryside).
The film’s greatest qualities are two-fold: on the one hand, the exceptional cinematography and particularly strong use of colour endows the film with a unique aesthetic redolent of the Eastern sci-fi tradition from Konstantin Lopushansky to Piotr Szulkin; on the other hand, it focalises the story from the perspective of the scientists and thus exposes our potential and total defamiliarisation from the natural world today, whereby we find greater identification with the scientists’ lack of understanding than the farmers’ impassioned appreciation of the land. The film won the FIPRESCI Prize and was selected as the Short Film Candidate for the 38th European Film Awards. A good companion to this film in the realm of animation was to be found in Light Fragments by Asakura Satomi (Japan, 2024) which uses visual abstraction to explore the boundaries between sleep and reality.
She Crossed (Zhang Daisy Ziyan)
An American production shot in Spanish by a director with Asian heritage about an ordinary woman from South America, She Crossed by Zhang Daisy Ziyan (USA, 2024) is an exemplary work about migration and the power of human connection. The lady who is a cleaner entrusts her story to the young director, and we follow her throughout her routine, her reflections and exchanges with her family.
The film portrays the United States as a place with which we are not familiar and do not see every day: it is a place of estrangement rather than dreams, but it is also a meeting point, where many microcosms co-exist and people inhabit altogether different worlds. Locating the seemingly ordinary actions of one woman as key to the effect she has in the lives of many, the film shows us the true meaning of heroism.
La última Frontera (Camila Dron)
Given that there were many experimental films in competition makes the achievement of one film all the greater. La última frontera/The Last Border by Camila Dron (Argentina, 2025) is this year’s chief example of surrealist filmmaking at its best. A ship navigating its way to Argentina, a woman in vigil and a Yiddish acapella by a beautiful female voice makes for an astounding exploration of memory. In short, the film is about moving to a new world and how it reverberates in the soul: its images evoke unexpected associations and its sounds deeper emotions. The film is a great reworking of Jewish cultural heritage and is universal in its message of finding the answers to life’s problems by recourse to poetry.
****
Returning to the ‘problem of pain’ once brilliantly articulated by C.S. Lewis this was also one that permeated the struggles and challenges – historical, physical, spiritual – faced by the heroes of many films in this year’s competition. The quality of their response and by extension that of the filmmaker determined the emergence (or not) of true works of art: films that internalise and yet transcend the problem to arrive at greater reverence for the gift of life.