51st International Student Film Festival Sehsüchte

A personal documentary film with animated elements. In it, Jelena tells of her greatest fear: her father’s immanent release from prison. And of the illness which brought him there. A father-daughter relationship - between unconditional love and boundless fear.

 Best Pitch

Summer 2020, the uprising against the belarussian dictator Lukaschenko is brutally put down and many of the demonstrators are arrested. In a minimalist yet expressive re-enactment, Handbook visualises methods of torture and imprisonment as a cold-blooded choreography.

 best documentary (short)

The camera takes a close-up look at the lives of a community of lesbian and non-binary people in the Georgian city of Kutaisi. Around the football matches the protagonists meet to celebrate, discuss, dance, love, laugh and thus create a safe space far away from the outside world.

 best documentary (long)

The young mother Lili flees from the countryside to the city to support her family financially. There, however, she falls into the clutches of a surrogacy agency and directly finds herself in another desperate situation. Within the oppressive building complex, Lili searches for security and independence.

 Best Feature Film Short

Gabo (15) is in love for the first time in his life; but not with his boyfriend Max (15), but the nine-year-old boy next door. Overwhelmed by this realisation, Gabo seeks out other people on the Dark Net who feel the way he does and soon finds himself at the centre of a criminal investigation.

 Best Screenplay

A father and his estranged daughter meet unexpectedly on their way to Naples to identify a corpse via DNA-test. In the shade of the Italian summer, the two get to know each other again and dive together into the memories of an unprocessed past.

 Best Animation Film

Revelinho is a big fan of Dutch folk music and tries to process his parents’ problems through his songs. Together with his friends, he will do everything in his power to set things right again at home with his performance at an open mic concert.

 Future Kids

The amateur musician Slouch already sees himself on the big stage but plays in front of empty clubs instead. Driven by ambition, sensationalism, and his musically gifted demon Nuffti, he neglects his girlfriend and drifts further and further into a spiral of excess.

 Best Genre Film

In 2014, a part of the Donbas fell under separatist control. The Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyey reported from his hometown of Donezk. In 2017 he was abducted because of this, only being released in 2019. In 2020, he works on a book in Kyjiw in which he processes his experiences in prison “isolation”.

 Best Production

When Lia moves into the long-abandoned house next door, Giulio is hooked. Her aloof, sullen manner fascinates and confuses him. But her greatest secret seems to be concealed in the old villa at the other end of the garden. A coming-of-age drama about relationships, commitments and first love.

 Best Feature Film

While we dive into the monstrous, yet aesthetic and bustling world of shipping containers, sailors tell us about their lives, which became even more dreary during the pandemic.

 Best 360° Film

An Australian school class’ online lesson turns into a Zoom fairy-tale, in which two smitten schoolgirls can visit each other through the screen, entering their own fantasy. Here, the virtual and physical worlds blur, making for some magical moments.

 Future Teens