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Entropia director: Flóra Anna Buda.  Photo: © Flóra Anna Buda

At the 2019 edition of Berlinale Shorts, 24 films from 17 countries will be competing for the Golden and Silver Bear, the Audi Short Film Award, endowed with 20,000 euros, and a nomination as “Berlin Short Film Candidate for the European Film Awards 2019”.

This year’s competition includes works by Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Martín Rejtman, Luca Tóth, Rainer Kohlberger, Eva Könnemann, Flóra Anna Buda and Manuel Abramovich, among others. Al Mahatta by Eltayeb Mahdi and Crvene gumene čizme by Jasmila Žbanić will also be screened out of competition.

The films of the 2019 edition of the Berlinale Shorts’ international competition treat diverse aspects of power, visibility and knowledge, as integral elements in the section’s overarching examination of the nature of participation. “We need new role models and a multitude of stories if we are to create a viable future for all of us,” states curator Maike Mia Höhne, who has served as section head for Berlinale Shorts since 2007 and will be assuming the role of Artistic Director of the Hamburg International Short Film Festival from March 2019.

Rise by Wagner & de Burca, whose work will be featured at the Brazilian pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennale, documents POC artists with post-migrant backgrounds engaged in an act of self-empowerment through music and spoken word performance in Toronto’s underground. In Rainer Kohlberger’s dystopian experimental work It has to be lived once and dreamed twice, the voice of Annika Henderson awakens into the role of a new species after the extinction of humanity, while Flóra Anna Buda’s animated characters manage to liberate themselves from both capitalist and hetero-normative coercion in Entropia. Louis Fried’s Flexible Bodies tackles dreams of careerism and self-optimisation, and Manuel Abramovich also reveals aspects of the wider job world at Berlinale Shorts 2019 in Blue Boy – which features conversations with men earning a living as sex workers in Berlin. The three films Crvene gumene čizme, Omarska and Can't You See Them? – Repeat. on the other hand focus on the post-war zone of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This latter part of the programme serves as a departure point for an examination of remembrance culture and the dynamics of participation in the writing of history.

The International Short Film Jury for 2019 is composed of US-American Jeffrey Bowers, Senior Curator at Vimeo, Croatia’s Vanja Kaludjercic, Director of Acquisitions at MUBI, and Koyo Kouoh, founder and Artistic Director of RAW Material Company from Senegal.

Films at Berlinale Shorts 2019:

All on a Mardi Gras Day, Michal Pietrzyk, USA, 22’ (IP)

Al Mahatta, Eltayeb Mahdi, Sudan, 16’, 1989 (out of competition)

Blue Boy, Manuel Abramovich, Argentina, Germany, 19’ (WP)

Can't You See Them? - Repeat., Clarissa Thieme, Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 9’ (WP)

Crvene gumene čizme, Jasmila Žbanić, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 18’, 2000 (out of competition)

Entropia, Flóra Anna Buda, Hungary, 10’ (WP)

Flexible Bodies, Louis Fried, Germany, 19’ (WP)

Héctor, Victoria Giesen Carvajal, Chile, 19’ (WP)

How to Breathe in Kern County, Chris Filippone, USA, 9’ (WP)

It has to be lived once and dreamed twice, Rainer Kohlberger, Germany, Austria, 28’ (WP)

Kingdom, Tan Wei Keong, Singapore, 5’ (IP)

Leyenda dorada, Chema García Ibarra, Ion de Sosa, Spain, 11’ (WP)

Lidérc úr, Luca Tóth, Hungary, France, 19’ (WP)

Mot Khu Dat Tot, Pham Ngoc Lan, Vietnam, 19’ (WP)

Në Mes, Samir Karahoda, Kosovo, 15’ (WP)

Omarska, Varun Sasindran, France, 19’ (WP)

Past Perfect, Jorge Jácome, Portugal, 23’ (WP)

Prendre feu, Michaël Soyez, France, 26’ (WP)

Rang Mahal, Prantik Basu, India, 27’ (IP)

Rise, Bárbara Wagner, Benjamin de Burca, Brazil, Canada, USA, 20’ (IP)

Shakti, Martín Rejtman, Argentina, Chile, 19’ (WP)

The Spirit Keepers of Makuta'ay, Yen-Chao Lin, Canada, 11’ (WP)

Splash, Shen Jie, China, 9’ (WP)

Suc de síndria, Irene Moray, Spain, 22’ (WP)

Umbra, Florian Fischer, Johannes Krell, Germany, 20’ (WP)

Welt an Bord, Eva Könnemann, Germany, 29’ (WP)