ExtraVALUE Film Award 2022

Jury Statement

This year’s ExtraVALUE Film Award jury chose to devote the award to a pair of short works that take as their subject matter two of the most important and foundational realms of human experience: sex and death.

The ExtraVALUE Film Award goes to Eve Heller for SINGING IN OBLIVION.

Eve Heller’s SINGING IN OBLIVION uses a variety of techniques - observational photography, found imagery, photograms, and rich sound design - to conjure a meditation on death, memory, and transience. Centering on the Jewish Cemetery in the Vienna district of Währing, which was partially destroyed by the Nazis and is today in a state of decay, Heller combines her own ghostly footage of the cemetery with photograms of organic material, as well as fragmentary imagery reprinted from glass negatives she discovered in a flea market. The film itself becomes a kind of photogram: a physical object on which now-vanished lives have left their imprint, speaking equally to presence and absence.

The ExtraVALUE Film Award goes to Jan Soldat for BLIND DATE.

Though a profoundly different film in almost every way, Jan Soldat’s BLIND DATE is nevertheless also about the relationship between the intangibles of human experience and their physical manifestations, in this case centering on desire and the body. Working in collaboration with his protagonists, Soldat demystifyies the sexual act and focuses attention on what most other films on the subject elide: the deeply human mixture of awkwardness, vulnerability, social protocol, and tentative connection that frames sexual intercourse. Part of a series in which Soldat presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of erotic practices, BLIND DATE is radical not for its frank depiction of sex but for its unflinching, unsentimental, but empathetic curiosity about the experience of two individuals coming together to satisfy their physical desires.