Diagonale Award Innovative Cinema'23 for Eva Egermann and Cordula Thym

C-TV (Wenn ich Dir sage, ich habe Dich gern ...), Innovatives Kino kurz, AT 2023, digital, 30 min, OmdU

In memory of Ianina Ilitcheva.

The earth has been shaken, the television studio destroyed, C-TV goes on air: Hedi, the plush talk show host welcomes people with disabilities who offer insight into their daily lives and their artistic and political work. An (unfortunately) fictitious TV show opposing the tyranny of a heteronormative and ableist society: radical, critical of representation, humorous, and barrier-free.

The jury's reasoning:
„We, the jury for the Diagonale Prize Innovative Cinema, spent our time discussing how the films in our selection made us imagine better futures, new cinemas, new ways of working, and being in the world. We took to heart an American writer, film blogger, and critic Girish Shambu’s manifesto for a new cinephilia, where he imagines a new cinephilia with ‘a broader definition of pleasure: it values the aesthetic experience of cinema, but it demands more. It finds pleasure, additionally, in a deep curiosity about the world and a critical engagement with it.’ This year’s winner for us encompassed all of these things, a playful and accomplished experimentation with form and structure which flows directly from the foregrounding of the infrastructure of representational justice in filmmaking and watching. In this film, we found space and joy imagining a world where we and the world might be changed through a critical engagement with issues of disability justice through film, we look forward to seeing what the future holds for this filmmaking team.“

Jury:
Jemma Desai (writer, researcher, programmer, UK).
Lisl Ponger (visual artist, filmmaker, AT)
Maja Osojnik (composer, musician, sound artist, label operator, AT/SI)