Germany

Ester Amrami

Credits and biography

film still

Ulrich Aschenbrenner

Credits and biography

film still

Jury Statement

Ester Amrami, HaYoreh – First Rain
The short HaYoreh (First Rain) shows us the everyday life of Noa, a ten-year-old girl who lives in a small town in northern Israel. It’s November 1989. The young director’s impressive achievement is to have condensed a day in the life of the young girl through a complex narrative structure in a way that fuses a child’s emotions and observations with events on the political world stage. Ester Amrami tenderly guides us through Noa’s world. Dreams mix with news on the radio. Old trees and an abandoned house form the backdrop to a fairy-tale world for an afternoon. As the summer heat hangs over the town and seems to paralyze its inhabitants, Noa plants a seed in the dry soil. When the rain that everybody longed for finally begins to fall, as it waters the earth and the town comes back to life, the world beyond the little town also seems to have come out of some form of paralysis. Everything seems to be opening up and changing.

The filmmaker traces the dreams, troubles and desires of childhood. She shows us how they are confronted with social reality, often in a completely disproportionate way, and how this contributes to their magic. She manages to examine “boundary crossings” on many different levels of her film – on a political, a psychological and a cinematic level – and to make them tangible.

Ulrich Aschenbrenner, Castling in the Caucasus
Castling in the Caucasus tells the surprising story of an exchange of two villages across the boundaries between Azerbaijanis and Armenians which, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, occurred in 1989. In his clear images, Filmmaker Ulrich Aschenbrenner manages to boil a complex and charged historical and political conflict down to one pointed question: What does being at home somewhere really mean? This new, slightly changed angle allows us to perceive the conflict in a different way.