The Mess triumphs at 25FPS

The 12th International Experimental Film and Video Festival 25FPS (29 Sept - 2 Oct) in Zagreb wrapped on Sunday night with US filmmaker Peter Burr winning one of the Grand Prix and the Critics Jury Award for The Mess. The main jury unanimously decided to award three equal Grand Prix awards.

The Mess "…quite convincingly combines a formal experiment, clear and consistent narrative and an interesting conceptual proposition. The philosophical dimension of the film is a reflection of the dialectic relationship between man and technology. Using the nostalgic aesthetic of 1980s and 1990s computer games, the author erases the boundaries between the theatre screen and the computer screen, as well as between elite art and mass culture. The film impressively reflects the contemporary social moment when the material and virtual spheres start growingly to resemble two sides of the same reality," said the critics Tina Poglajen (Slovenia), Bojan Krištofić (Croatia), and Greg de Cuir (US/Serbia) in their statement.

Indian directors Shumona Goel and Shai Heredia received the second Grand Prix for the rich and superinventive An Old Dog's Diary, about which the jury consisting of filmmakers Deborah Stratman (US), Dane Komljen (Serbia/Bosnia and Herzegovina), and George Clark (UK), said is "A humane study of the divorce between an artist and their work. The film is an expansive and philosphical minature attuned to the precarious experience of value."

The third Grand Prix went to Manuela De Laborde's cryptic and contemplative As Without So Within (US-Mexico-UK), "A film that conjures a new materialism in the cinema, a remarkable series of objects fluctuating between the atomic and the cosmic. Austere and inscrutable yet resolutely sensual and hyponotic," as the jury put it in their statement.

A special mention went to the French production Ciudad Maya by Andrés Padilla Domene.

The Green DCP Award, given out by the festival organizers and consisting of making a DCP copy for the film, was handed to Croatia's Marko Tadić for Moving Elements.

The Audience Award went to Brazilian filmmakers Helena Ungaretti, Miguel Antunes Ramos, and Alexandre Wahrhaftig for E.