In groups no larger than five, high school pupils could participate in the film contest by producing and sending in their own short film with a maximum length of three minutes. The prize for the winner was a 25.000 DKK travel grant sponsored by Sønderborg municipality. As 2015 is the International Year of Light, all short films had to have light as their overall topic, but the genre could be anything from fiction, faction to facts. As a starting point, the participants could get inspired by the inspiration catalogue about light.
Four finalists and many guests
Four short films made it to the final and were presented on the film festival ceremony in the concert hall at Alsion on April 24, 2015, where organiser Barbara Tvede Andersen welcomed the guests and led them through the evening. Among them were the mayor of Sønderborg municipality, Erik Lauritzen, and the president of Flensburg University of Applied Sciences Holger Watter, as well as many other stakeholders from the Danish-German region.
The four short films in the final were produced by high school pupils from Esbjerg, Nykøbing Falster, Aabenraa, and Flensburg University of Applied Sciences. They all had very different approaches to the presentation of light. The audience had the possibility to vote for their favourite, but the final decision was taken by the jury, which had been selected for this particular purpose on the basis of their respective expertise within their scientific or artistic field.
Members of the jury
The president of the jury was the Danish film director Esben Tønnesen from Copenhagen. He has directed commercials for international companies such as Coca-Cola, Carlsberg, and Vodafone. He has also made a feature film, and his work with longer format movies has placed him among the most award-winning Danish directors in recent years. One of his recent works is the television series Sjit happens for TV2 Zulu. Read more about Esben and his work.
Furthermore, the jury consisted of Thilo Körkel. He is a physicist and editor for astronomy and physics at the German popular science magazine Spektrum der Wissenschaft. He studied at University of Karlsruhe (TH) and wrote his master thesis at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg. At the moment he is working on launching an online portal with scientific web videos called SciViews.
Third and last member of the jury was Michael Bauer, who also is a physicist and professor at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. He studied at Technische Universität München (TUM) and holds a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Ultra-fast and ultra-short are the two adjectives that characterise Michael Bauer's research, in which he focuses on the manipulation of ultra-fast processes of surface plasmonic and nanoscopic systems. Together with his group he is developing and employing time-resolved photoemission techniques and time- and angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy. Read more about his group and his research here.
Og vinderen er...
The audience film festival ceremony voted for Flensburg University of Applied Sciences' film Licht und Schatten (Light and Shadow) to be the winner. However, the jury did not have the slightest doubt and elected Mathis Bjerre and Eden Turin from Rybners Gymnasium in Esbjerg to be the winners of the film festival. You can watch all four finalist films here.
| Part-financed by the INTERREG 4A-programme Syddanmark-Schleswig-K.E.R.N. by means from the European Regional Development Fund. |  |