Eight Super8 films were presented to the audience for voting last Saturday night. The special thing about the Super8 competition in Weiterstadt is that the films are still traditionally shown as “real” film projections. For this purpose, a bright Fumeo film projector is activated every year, but despite 500W of light output, it has trouble illuminating the huge screen with sufficient brightness. This is particularly noticeable in comparison to the beamer projections before and after the Super8 competition.
This year’s winners are filmmakers who have all been regular participants in the Super8 competition in Weiterstadt for years and have all been among the winners before:
3rd prize – Acht Dosen westwärts (“Eight Cans Westward”)
by Gunnar Grah, Andreas Kersten and Florian Rau
The three filmmakers manage to portray the essence of a classic Italo Western in a very convincing way in a good seven minutes of running time. Right at the beginning, the titles designed in the style of the time immerse the viewer in films of that era. The framing of the individual shots and the editing sequences correspond exactly to the genre-typical film design.
A great deal of technical effort was put into implementing this “look”. The camera image window has been modified so that a precisely delineated widescreen format can be projected even without an anamorphic lens. Like a real motion picture film of its time, it was shot on negative stock (Kodak Vision 50D), which was traditionally physically cut and spliced with a tape splicer. For projection, the finished cut negative was copied onto positive material at Andec Filmtechnik and provided with magnetic edge track for dubbing.
The music and sound design by Fabian Koppri, who has already worked with the filmmakers several times, plays a major role in the coherent and authentic overall effect of the film.
Information on other Super8 films by the filmmaking trio can be found here.
2nd prize – Fifty-Fifty
by Michael Sommermeyer / text by Roman Israel
The semi-documentary road movie tells the story of an obscure journey of two friends to Serbia.
On the basis of the Super8 recordings made in advance, the writer Roman Israel wrote the film text and also recorded it. The black-and-white shots in the typical Super8 look and the text by Roman Israel complement each other in a very successful and enjoyable way. Image and sound combine to create a road movie whose idiosyncratic humor points far beyond the adversities depicted in the film during the drive.
A trailer for the film, more info and the film stills can be found here
The style of the text, which is laid out as a first-person narrative, is very reminiscent of that of the found footage film “Der Clou des Uhus”, whose text was also written by Roman Israel and which he read live in 2014 at the live setting competition of the 15th Dresden small format film.
1st prize – Aktenzeichen XY (“File XY”)
by Manuel Francescon and Michael Sommermeyer
Older readers will surely remember the TV series of the same name from the 1970/80s with Eduard Zimmermann. In the winning film of this year’s competition, a typical TV episode is re-enacted on Super8, with a studio recreated with simple but effective means, with studio guests and with recorded cases.
The set and moderation texts keep close to the original and can thus benefit from the original’s unintentional real satire factor. Manuel Francescon plays his role as presenter very convincingly; you can tell that a professional speaker is at work here. The humor is similar to that of Francescon and Sommermeyer‘s other Super8 films together, but unfortunately sometimes gets too stuck in the clunky. But the taste of the audience was met by this humor on this hot summer evening.
The filmmakers Grah-Karsten-Rau contributed a “case episode” for this film as well as participating as actors (studio guests!) . So on this evening all prize winners were “first” !
The other competition films were:
BBB – La Bete, La Belle et la Be te by Michel A. Chappuis
In the fog by k.Schreier
The two films by Chappuis and Schreier tied for 4th place in the audience vote.
Shiloh Ranch – the 624th (!!) film by Stefan Möckel
8H13 – Experimental portrait of an artist during the lockdown by photo artist Anna C. Wagner and Markus Mischkowski
Faster, Sophie by Stephan Grosse-Grollmann
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