e-flux Film Award winners

e-flux Film Award is very pleased to announce the winners of its inaugural edition. The 2023 pre-selection committee members Lukas Brasiskis, Dmitry Frolov, and Steff Hui Ci Ling presented a shortlist of twelve films, picked from over a thousand submissions, for the jury’s consideration. 

Comprised of writer and filmmaker Charles Mudede, artist Anri Sala, and filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong, the jury awarded first prize to Maurício Chades for Green Cemetery (2023, 25 minutes), second prize to Eri Saito for May All Your Wounds Heal (2021, 5 minutes), and a special mention to Bo Wang for An Asian Ghost Story (2023, 37 minutes).

Thank you to all the artists and filmmakers who submitted their work to this year’s edition. And congratulations to the winners!

The award ceremony will be held in New York at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, January 18, 2024 at 7pm. The ceremony will feature the international premiere of Green Cemetery and the US premieres of May All Your Wounds Heal and An Asian Ghost Story, in the presence of the awardees as well as jury member Anocha Suwichakornpong and pre-selection committee member Lukas Brasiskis.

Get tickets for the award ceremony here.

We are also very pleased to share this edition’s shortlisted films, to be screened at a later date in February—please stay tuned!

Shortlisted films
Alia Ardon and Safdar Ahmed, Border Farce (Australia, 2022, 15 minutes)
José Cardoso, What the Soil Remembers (Ecuador/South Africa, 2022, 29 minutes)
Sim Hahahah, Memory Playthrough (United States, 2022, 2 minutes)
Daryna Mamaisur, Smoke of the Fire (Ukraine/Portugal, 2022, 21 minutes)
Nour Ouayda, The Secret Garden (Lebanon, 2023, 27 minutes)
Riar Rizaldi, Notes from Gog Magog (Indonesia/South Korea, 2022, 19 minutes)
Tulapop Saenjaroen, Mangosteen (Thailand, 2022, 40 minutes)
Chulayarnnon Siriphol, ANG48 (Thailand/South Korea/China, 2022, 25 minutes)
Yuan Zheng, Hepingli Playthrough (China/United States, 35 minutes, 2022)

First prize
Maurício Chades: Green Cemetery (Brazil, 2023, 25 minutes)
Lavina retires and buys a house in a small city in the middle of a Brazilian savanna. Not even grass would grow on the degraded soil of her backyard. So she starts to plant an agroforestry garden offering each seedling to a loved one who passed away.

Second prize
Eri Saito: May All Your Wounds Heal (Japan, 2021, 5 minutes)
We cannot feel the pain of others, though if one were to physically connect the nerves in one’s brain to another’s body, one might be able to do so. The artist’s simulated experience of this pain acts as a complex neural transmission that cannot be interpreted.

Honorable mention
Bo Wang, An Asian Ghost Story (Hong Kong/The Netherlands, 2023, 37 minutes)
This film is about haunting memories of Asia's late twentieth-century modernization. The story departs from a 1965 United States embargo on the hair trade, known as the Communist Hair Ban. Yet, in every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past.

About the Awardees
Maurício Chades is an artist and filmmaker from Brazil. He holds a BA in Cinema Studies and an MA in Art and Technology from the University of Brasilia, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has participated in collectives such as Espaço AVI, Kinofogo Cineclube, and NINHO—Collective for Research in Art, Interactivity, and Agroecology. His works, in film, installation, sculpture, and performance have speculated about symbiotic, queer, and anticolonial futures. Through fiction, he strives to blur the separations between city, countryside, and forest. Envisioning syntropic environments and multispecies alliances, his art practice combines storytelling with restorative agriculture, composting, and fungiculture. His works have been shown worldwide, including at Queer Lisbon, Curitiba International Film Festival, and FILE—Electronic Language International Festival. In 2019, he presented his first solo show, Pyramid, Urubu, at The Brasilia Digital TV Tower, receiving the Frankenthaler Climate Art Awards in 2022. Chades was featured at the Biennial Videobrasil, and is currently a visiting artist at The Metabolic Studio in Los Angeles.

Eri Saito is a Japanese visual artist living and working in Tokyo. Born 1991 in Fukushima. She graduated from the Wako University Department of Arts, Faculty of Representational Studies, in 2015. Focusing on video, Saito creates works themed on such invisible and uncertain dynamics as memory and cognition. Her recent exhibitions include WVlog: Personal (Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo, 2022), Until It Gets Dark (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 2021), Glory of 2020 (Yumi Adachi Contemporary / Awoba Soh, Tokyo, 2020), and 1GB (Spiral Hall, Tokyo, 2020). Her video works have been shown at the 40th edition of the International Festival of Films on Art—Le FIFA (Montreal, Canada, 2022), Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, 2022), Image Forum Festival (Theatre Image Forum, Tokyo, 2020), and The Movie Theater Floating on the Sea (Kanagawa, 2019), among other places.

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Amsterdam. He holds a BS in Physics and Mathematics and an MS in Physics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Wang’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art (New York), Garage Museum (Moscow), International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Image Forum Festival (Tokyo), Visions du Réel (Nyon, Switzerland), LUX & Open City Documentary Festival (London), DMZ Docs (South Korea), and Para Site (Hong Kong), among many other places. His film An Asian Ghost Story won the New:Vision Award at CPH:DOX 2023. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residence at ACC-Rijksakademie from 2017 to 2018, as well as at NTU CCA in 2016.

About e-flux Film Award
e-flux Film Award is a prize for artists’ films that push the boundaries of the aesthetic and critical potential of moving images in the age of planetary circulation of information. Selected by a jury of distinguished artists, filmmakers, and film selectors and curators from open submissions, it is awarded annually, with three awards given: a first prize of 3000 USD, a second prize of 2000 USD, and an honorable mention. e-flux Film Award welcomes submissions from both emerging and established artists who subvert and redefine traditional narrative forms and broaden our understanding and perception through the mastery of both film form and content. “How does one see what is hidden behind the images?,” Harun Farocki once asked. In line with e-flux Film’s programming that aims to challenge the expectations established by the commodification of moving-image art and to facilitate the critical discussion of artists’ films, e-flux Film Award is committed to recognizing works that deviate from the dominant and conventional regimes of visibility providing insightful and critical perspectives on today’s world.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.