ExtraVALUE Film Award 2020

Jury Reasoning
 

The ExtraVALUE Film Award 2020 goes to Georg Tiller and Maéva Ranaïvojaona for ZAHO ZAY.

ZAHO ZAY is a precise, complex and conscious cinematic meditation on the human condition. The protagonist, a guard in a Madagascan prison, fantasizes about the return of her father, who left her when she was a child. Between supervising the humiliating rituals of the prisoners’ daily roll call, shaving the heads of the condemned and distributing food, she dreams of a mythical father, an unreachable outlaw, who wanders through a biography of crimes and whose deeds are determined neither by reason nor emotion. Only the dice he throws decide on the progress of his actions. This dialectic of freedom and imprisonment, chance and order in the film’s narrative also becomes the pivotal point of its construction on other levels. At the beginning, the voice of the narrator, who increasingly transforms the text into a poem, seems to belong to the author of the script. In the course of time, however, the voice shifts to the protagonist, merging with the images of the final part of the film to become a hallucinatory poem. The cinematic gaze also oscillates between documentary and staged positions. When a colonial view by the filmmakers still flashes up in the sequences in the prison yard, it disappears in the dreamlike apparitions of the father. These movements between different forms of representation turn into an indistinguishable whole. The slow rhythm, the precise editing and the perfect interlocking of seemingly incoherent elements transform ZAHO ZAY into something unmistakable, into a work that goes beyond the genres of feature film or documentary.

The ExtraVALUE Film Award 2020 goes to Pavel Cuzuioc for BITTE WARTEN – PLEASE HOLD THE LINE.

BITTE WARTEN – PLEASE HOLD THE LINE is a quiet film that has a humorous and clever take on the subject of communication technology. It follows telecommunication technicians on their call-outs to households in the countryside, mostly in small villages, which also includes travelling to some neighboring eastern countries bordering the EU. We gain insight into personal stories, into other realities of life. The connecting factor is that telecommunication is always also a chain of never-ending absurdities to which we’re all exposed. A recurring theme in the film is the people’s criticism of the bad programs that they are sold. This film is definitely not one of them.