BEST OF FILMSCHOOLFEST

Each year in the fall, young up-and-coming directors from all over the world are invited to FILMSCHOOLFEST MUNICH, the internationally renowned festival of film schools. Selected short films made by these talented individuals are screened, usually at the Filmmuseum, for a week in November, often with the directors present.

Last year, due to the pandemic, the festival was held online, with special guests joining via the Internet. This year’s BEST OF FILMSCHOOLFEST will as usual be held in a cinema setting, though outdoors for a change. We’ll show a selection of award-winning films and audience favorites that were screened at FILMSCHOOLFEST MUNICH 2019 and 2020. There are seven films in total: four short feature films, two short documentaries, and one animated film.

The films of 2019:

In LAST CALL by Hajni Kis, a woman in her 60s wants to leave her home in Budapest to live abroad with her daughter. The day before her departure, however, she has doubts. Hajni Kis graduated from the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest with this film and received the main prize of FILMSCHOOLFEST MUNICH 2019, the VFF Young Talent Award. The same year, Fanni Mikkonen, a screenwriting student at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, wowed festival audiences with her short film WEDDING NIGHT. In it, two little girls pretend that their dolls are having a wedding. To the horror of their mother, they then have the dolls enact the wedding night. PINKY PROMISE by Sophie Linnenbaum, a student of film directing at the Film University of Babelsberg, also takes a surprising turn. A girl celebrates her confirmation with her parents in a high-class restaurant, but the feast gets absurdly and gruesomely out of hand.

The films of 2020:

For his short film HE PULLS HIS TRUCK, with which he graduated from the Moscow Film School, Kirill Proskurin was awarded the VFF Young Talent Award in 2020. In the film, a boy tries to get a toy truck out of a locked compartment with the help of a mysterious gatekeeper. In the animated film THE KITE, a boy visits his grandpa in the countryside and flies a kite with him. The graduation film by Martin Smatana, a student at FAMU in Prague, is a tender reflection on human transience. In his short documentary ANGRY FOLKS, Yangon Film School student Aung Htet Myet follows a rebellious two-piece band of that name across Myanmar. Hot on the heels of two Brazilian twin brothers who fled to Europe because of homophobic sentiment in their homeland is Páris Cannes, a student at the Brussels film school INSAS. Cannes was awarded the Wolfgang Längsfeld Prize for THE DRAGON WITH TWO HEADS.