This year's festival has distinctively shown the possibilities and reciprocations of narrow gauge, even when made by amateurs and even when it's "only" the Super-8 hobby format. Not for nervous people.
This year I didn't plan any coverage but the oppulent program cannot remain without remark. So nevertheless here's a digest.
Short but with presentation of the nice manually montaged festival trailer.
Cameras were not too present in old Romania so you couldn't just see how the pictures learned running but also how the protagonistes learned walking.
Here it was shown how the projection itself can be modified e.g. with color slides and caleidoscope so that on the screen different effects can be evoked.
No Schmalfilmtage without at least one serious topic – where last time the music clips from czeche republic gave a notion of the political tightrope walk this time the footage from former Czechoslovakia turned really serious.
The shown material was from the occupation of Liberec, Praha etc. which started 1969 and ended only twenty years later. This was a conflict you may know from history lessons only, yet it surely wasn't wrongly located here in view of recent crisis.
Though this year the festival itself does not celebrate a round birthday but in worthy way the 60th one of Super 8 format which was honoured with a small program. Therein the different aspects of the format such as a promotional clip for private sector, half-professional hobby productions, an experimental side-result out of a polyester bag and a shortenend-sold cinema movie were shown and explained.
In the festival lounge "Runde Ecke" an exhibition of different working editing tables/viewers with inserted short loops could be found.
This year again exciting. Following contributions won a prize:
Screening of an old 90s low budget movie on a mafia/gang war and love relationships, accompanied by live music full of mood and temper
In their short evaluation session the jury did agree on the jury award to DECADENTIA, a post-acopalyptic film with sculptures and a honourable mention to IN MY HEAD, a screaming film about the multiple sclerosis of the submitter itself. However when proclaiming the prize and mention the jury slightly disagreed on wether it is possible to award one of the films as the best at all as the contributions are of very different kind.
The audience award did got to DER PLOT. This contribution presented the for the spectator entertaining planning session for a new amateur film which was condemned to fail because of the completely incompatible approaches within the planning group.
The other films were also fascinating, especially the music video SUAS with music more driving than last years jury winner and THE JACOBS WAY as shortest video addressing ADHD, THE BODY REMEMBERS as a appeal against stoning as well as SLIDES which approaches the enduring family hobby topic "found footage" with a colorful dadaistic solution already shown in similar fashion on the 23th schmalfilmtage.
The panel at the end was pretty small as this year not as many of the filmmakers were present and those were partly occupied with sighting the defective film roll. Anywhay interesting as the then-only participant, Ben Slotover, the submitter of SLIDES, could talk extensivly about his projects/workshops and his favourite other contribution beneath the "depressing" international competition program, indirectly confirming my personal overall impression of this years' festival program being pretty earnest, reflecting the time we live in.
This years' workshop was about a multiple developent of a color film in sophisticated order with different chemicals so that selected frames can be developed in black-and-white, other frames in color. By taping off lengthwise it is even possible to split single frames into color and bw sections more or less precisely.
Two uncut films with seven minutes in total were screened. Their production was from Friday to Saturday.
Bluesky: Backlink deu, Backlink eng
30. März: Abschnitt Super-8-Ausstellung verschoben, Super-8-Geburtstag würdig, Landesangabe SUAS gelöscht (Koherenz), Bezug/Abgrenzung dadaistische Methode klargestellt, Liberec-Genitiv
14. Juli 2026: Sprachpriorisierung angepasst; Bezeichung Audience-award