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Discover the award-winning films of the 1st Athens Short Film Festival’s 9 competition categories and learn more about all the inspiring filmmakers we featured this year.
Best Animation Winner
Clayton's Last Breath
Clayton is keeping himself alive with a machine, so that his baby, can grow up and take care of itself. One day, Clayton is forced to leave his vital machine.
Simon Reinhardt
Best Cinematography Winner
Remission
Inspired by co-creator of the film Artist Paul Kaiser’s struggle with PTSD and his real life mission to reconnect with his daughters, three creatures are manifestations of an unknown soldier’s war trauma and his vast, lonely pilgrimage toward emerging from a purgatory loop. The film features vibrant handmade creature costumes and breathtaking visuals of the Southern California landscape; from Death Valley to Sequoia, each shot is carefully composed as if a painting.
John Charter
Best Comedy Winner
Level 4
Two first-time criminals find themselves out of luck when their getaway vehicle is clamped up in a multi-storey car park.
Charles Copsey
Best Documentary Winner
Lessons From a School Shooting: Notes from Dunblane
Following the Sandy Hook Massacre, a priest from Dunblane, Scotland reaches out to Father Bob offering support 16 years after a school shooting in his own town. The men bond over personal trauma and responsibilities … In the aftermath the UK reformed its gun laws; the US responded with inaction.
Kim A. Snyder
Best Drama Winner
hashtagwill
15 year old William doesn’t feel much support from his friends when he tries to fight against harassments and bullying around him. Like many video bloggers, he suffers from hatred, but he also has the battle against his own demons to deal with. One weekend he gets permission to use the school auditorium alone to record a video but strange events start to occur. Someone is also threatening him…
Per Sundström
Best Editing Winner
City of my Heart
A personal glimpse into Madrid, an experimental urban cityscape, an ode to life through a dance.
Kostas Petsas
Best Experimental Winner
Apex
“Emergence of a hybrid human-alien consciousness from the void” APEX explores the emergence of a higher life form, the convergence of intelligence and higher consciousness in the primordial void of infinite potential. A portal through which something greater and far more malevolent has emerged. This conceptual film was inspired by a love of the ‘Alien’ franchise and the work of H.R Giger. I wanted to explore the Alien concept set in a future abstraction. We witness a genetic hybrid emerging from the void, composed of the alien and human DNA. The creature: a biological zenith represents the pinnacle in biological evolution and higher consciousness, the being represents balance, a queen and creator, the APEX of being. I employed symbolism to build a subtext, using light (illumination) that symbolises the beginning or awareness or consciousness, the cube (structure) that represents the totality of human intelligence, alongside the blackness in both liquid and solid form to represent the void.
Stuart T Birchall
Best Music Score Winner
Death Of Albine
‘Death of Albine’ is a collaborative film project between award-winning film director Mike Sharpe and British Installation Artist Rebecca Louise Law, inspired by elements of the French novel ‘The Sinful Priest’, by Emile Zola. The music and sound design for the film was created by Echoic Audio in Bristol. The music starts slowly with mournful tones and builds into more music realms and finally thrusting into a full orchestral string score. The slow build to this moment was intentional. As the character's central motive is death we wanted to create a sense of transition and also elation at this beautiful moment.
Mike Sharpe
Best Music Video Winner
Kids of Chaos
Girl athletes from the Down Syndrome Association of Greece, recreate through movement a sort of a Big Bang, dispersing into space they eventually come together to form a planetary system. Their perpetual motion/dance gives birth to IOTAPHI, the band.
Gregoris Rentis
Best Short Film Winner
The Ticket
We follow the course of a ticket for Public Transportation as it passes from hand to hand. Each person that holds the ticket carries his own story and a social problem as well. A social recording of the Greek crisis.
Haris Stathopoulos
Best Writing Winner
Dry Land
A little girl lives with her mother, father, and grandfather in a beautiful village in Iran. The village and the farms are dependent on water and rain to survive. This little girl finds her own way to help her family. Dry land is a poetic short story about the dream, fantasy and the power of imagination in children.
Farima Piroozpay
Best Foreign Short Winner
Shalim Goodbye
In order not to win it to his son who considers him a solitary scurvy, an old man from the Romagna country assumes a Moroccan Shalim as worker.
Jacopo Manzari