e-flux Film Award Ceremony: Second Edition

e-flux Film Award is very pleased to announce the winners of its second edition.

The jury has awarded first prize to Noor Abed for A Night We Held Between (2024, 30 minutes), second prize to Taiki Sakpisit for The Spirit Level (2023, 20 minutes), and an honorary mention to Anna Scherbyna for Scales (2024, 13 minutes).

This year, we are also happy to introduce the e-flux Prize for Cinematic Ingenuity, awarded independently by e-flux to a filmmaker who exhibits a uniquely visionary approach to the art of image production. The inaugural award goes to Maryam Tafakory for Mast-del (2023, 17 minutes).

Please join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, January 16, 2024 for the award ceremony, featuring screenings of the four winning films and messages from the award recipients. The evening will be hosted by jury member Elena Vogman alongside Lukas Brasiskis, member of the pre-selection committee and film and video curator at e-flux. We will have the honor of being joined in person by Noor Abed, winner of this edition’s first prize. 

Special screenings of the shortlisted films will take place in two parts on Saturday, January 25, 2025 at 3pm and 5pm. Please stay tuned for further details.

The 2024 jury was comprised of Saodat Ismailova, Shana Moulton, and Elena Vogman. The 2024 pre-selection committee members, Lukas Brasiskis, Dmitry Frolov, and Steff Hui Ci Ling, presented a shortlist of ten films for the jury’s consideration, selected from an inspiring array of over 800 moving-image works. Read more on the 2024 edition of e-flux Film Award here.

Films

Noor Abed, A Night We Held Between
2024, 30 minutes
Produced with the support of the Han Nefkens Foundation
The film centers around “Song for The Fighters,” which was found at the sonic archive of the Popular Art Center Palestine. Through the layers of the song, in a labyrinth of sounds and sites, the film conjures history as a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act. The film was shot in ancient sites in Palestine—caves, carved holes, underground passages, and wild valleys—the land becomes our main character. It traverses beyond the first layer of visibility to reveal a vast, hidden world similar to the one we know. Throughout the film, scenes intertwine rituals and narratives of community and resistance into everyday representations of social life in Palestine, thus emphasizing the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community.

Taiki Sakpisit, The Spirit Level
2023, 20 minutes
The Spirit Level meditates on the trauma and violence in the troubled Thailand reflected through the artist’s road trips across the northeastern region of Thailand along the Mekong River. The film begins with a downstream river that descends from Than Thong waterfall and flows into the Mekong River and explores the mythic underground cave that according to legend was a subterranean kingdom below the Mekong River where the divine Naga resides in the netherworld. At the heart of The Spirit Level is a frantic sequence of a spirit medium in the midst of possession. This epileptic episode emulates the optic feedback eliciting the trancelike revenant images as the spirited entity registers the medium’s body. Gradually the hallucinatory double images are disrupted by a freeze frame. This suspension of time occurs to commemorate the dislocated spirits of the three anti-government activists whose mutilated bodies were found in Mekong River in December 2019. The three men had been in exile since the 2014 coup d’état, until they were kidnapped by an officially sanctioned death squad. Their bodies were found handcuffed, disemboweled and stuffed with concrete blocks, wrapped in brown rice sacks and dumped into the Mekong River. It is one of countless forced disappearances and assassinations of political dissidents by the state since the 1970s and still ongoing and unresolved. The Spirit Level alludes to the undercurrents of darkness that ripple beneath the surface of problematic Thailand.

Anna Scherbyna, Scales
2024, 13 minutes
Scales is a short film, a collaged auto-fiction intertwining memories, fantasies, and reality. Buoyed by waves of audio-visual transformation, we follow the heroine’s journey out of the loop of traumatic repetition to pleasure.

Maryam Tafakory, Mast-del
2023, 17 minutes
Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires, both inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.

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 [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility                       
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.           
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                    
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.