2019 JURY PRIZES | PRIX DU JURY 2019

Congratulations to the winners of the MUFF 14 Jury Prizes!  |  Félicitations aux gagnants des prix du jury MUFF 14!
​MUFF 14 Jury: Mikaela Bobiy, Rosanna Maule

1st Prize | 1er Prix

LES MAISONS QU’ON ÉTAIT (THE HOUSES WE WERE)
Arianna Lodeserto
Italie | 2018 | 18ʹ00ʺ | italien/stfr

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The combination of archival footage, classical Italian cinema, and contemporary urbanity, upends the traditional documentary. No less political, this look at the housing crisis in Rome in the 1960s is both an elegy and a call to arms. The filmmaking is incisive, economical, and brilliant.
— Mikaela Bobiy


LES MAISONS QU’ON ÉTAIT addresses one of the most topical issues in urban dwelling today—the shortage and high cost of houses and the consequences of gentrification on lower income population—through a masterful montage of documentaries, TV reports, and independent films that reconstruct this phenomenon in postwar Italy. THE HOUSES WE WERE takes us into the past to comment on the present, through a constellation of striking images and testimonies. A dystopic panopticon of the modern city.
— Rosanna Maule

2nd Prize | 2e Prix

THE LAST SKATE
Sandy McLennan
Canada | 2018 | 4ʹ50ʺ | sans dialogue

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THE LAST SKATE in a few short minutes conveys nostalgia for childhoods past, seasons past, and climates past. It is a sensorial treat: ice cracking, blades scratching, springtime thaw gurgling, images fluttering like a camera shutter.
— Mikaela Bobiy


THE LAST SKATE brings us skating memories through ice cracking and wintery landscape. Yet this is more than an immersive experimental film about skating: it’s a powerful synecdoche of the Big Thaw. The ice cracks that we hear are a warning: the last skate could be the last skate.
— Rosanna Maule

3rd Prize | 3e Prix

SCOTTISH CONCERT
Todd Fraser
Canada | 2018 | 3ʹ10ʺ | sans dialogue

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SCOTTISH CONCERT hits you like a chaotic, Celtic watercolour. Like many good experimental films, the film plays with time—temporalities layered on top of each other like washed-out watermarks, the music pulling us along at a harried clip, until its elegiac-like finish. As with the best short films, it’s over before you can catch your breath.
— Mikaela Bobiy


This beautiful example of collage film spirals us into the world of Breton folk art and music, through an impeccable synthesis of sound and image.
— Rosanna Maule

Special Mention

UNLESS YOU’RE LIVING IT
Sarah Bliss
États-Unis | 2019 | 8ʹ23ʺ | anglais

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Despite its relatively short running time, UNLESS YOU’RE LIVING IT evokes an indelible sense of time and place, with Bliss deftly mixing sight and sound to create afterimages of an invisible community.
— Mikaela Bobiy


The hallucinatory and alienating experience of being marginal in North American towns today, rendered through hyper-saturated, reflected images, and the voices of those who live on the margin.
— Rosanna Maule

MUFF 14 Jury

MIKAELA BOBIY is a faculty member of the Humanities Department at Dawson College. She completed a PhD in Art History at Concordia University, where her research focused on performance art and masochism. She currently teaches courses on propaganda and visual culture, and more recently a course on horror film and moral philosophy. She is also an instructor with the Montreal Monstrum Society.

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ROSANNA MAULE is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Digital Platforms and Feminist Film Discourse: Women’s Cinema 2.0 (Palgrave, 2016), Beyond Auteurism (Intellect, 2008), and the main editor of In the Dark Room: Marguerite Duras and Cinema (Peter Lang, 2009). With Guylaine Dionne she has just completed a feature documentary film on the role of women directors in fiction film-making around the world. She has been a member of the research team GRAFICS since 2002 and she is an active member of the Women and Film History International association and of the Women’s Cinema Global network, with which she has directed two international conferences in Montreal in 2003 and 2016.

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