Aissa wins at Vilnius Film Shorts

The annual short film festival held in the Lithuanian capital saw Clement Trehin-Lalanne’s Aissa win Best Fiction. The powerful film is about a woman whose medical examination shows how many human beings can be treated like cattle when political circumstances arise. The film has already had an impressive track record winning awards at the likes of Clermont-Ferrand and gaining a special mention from the jury at the 2014 edition of Cannes. Also in the Best Fiction section, a special mention went to the EFA nominated film Picnic (Dir. Jura Pavlovic, 2015, Croatia).

The Best Animation went to Reka Busci’s Symphony No.42 while Best Documentary went to If Mama Ain't Happy, Nobody's Happy (Dir Mea de Jong, 2015, The Netherlands) a brilliant and affecting piece of work that plays with the rules of the genre in its examination of the director’s relationship with her mother.

The Best Lithuanian short film went to The Noisemaker (Dir. Karolis Kaupinis, 2015, Lithuania). The clever and wry social satire has proved one of the most popular Lithuanian shorts of the past few years after premiering at Locarno.
The jury were Auksė Kancerevičiūtė, a film critic and journalist from Lithuania, Denes Nagy, the Hungarian film director, and French producer Olivier Chantriaux.

Outside of the International and National competitions, the festival - which 7th-11th October - also held a joint retrospective of the works of British experimental filmmaker John Smith and Lithuanian filmmaker Deimantas Narkevičius and presented a programme of ‘Shorties’ from the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.