Open Frame Award // GoEast Film Festival 2019
From Wednesday 10 April to Tuesday 16 April 2019, goEast — Festival of Central and Eastern European Film will be transforming Wiesbaden for the 19th year running into one of the world’s most important showcases for cinema from Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to top-calibre filmmaking, the festival, hosted by DFF — Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, also features a host of innovative virtual reality projects.
For the second year in a row, experimental 360° and virtual reality works will be competing for the Open Frame Award at goEast. The competition, presided over by an expert international jury, is presented and endowed with a prize of 5,000 euros by BHF Bank Foundation.
Last year’s winners, the Russian artist duo of Natalya Severina and Denis Semionov, won over the jury with their interactive VR work “Nominal Empire”. The programme brings creatives from Eastern Europe together with an international audience and jury with the aim of developing a vision for the potential and future of VR art and cinema.
Eight interactive installations and 360° projects from Romania, Lithuania, Belarus, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia will be on display in the Open Frame Award exhibition. In the run-up to the festival, the projects can be experienced from Thursday 4 April to Sunday 7 April at DFF — Deutsches Filminstitut und Filmmuseum via headsets, before moving on to Museum Wiesbaden, where they will be shown during the festival week. Thanks to technical support from HTC Europe, Samsung Germany and INVR, visitors to the exhibition have the opportunity to immersive themselves in the projects at close range.
The international jury is composed this year of Dutch-Iranian VR artist Ali Eslami, Franziska Nori, director of Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Israeli VR curator Tal Haring.
“At goEast, we celebrate artistic freedom and the exploration of new forms for telling stories with virtual reality works. This year, our nominees reconnect with past events by reconstructing them in virtual reality, giving the audience the possibility to explore the environments and make up their own minds,” revealed Georgy Molodtsov, curator of the Open Frame Award, adding: “Social and emotional plots are allowed to unfold through deft, artistic use of the still young medium. We hope that our exhibition and award will play a valuable role in the creators’ efforts to expose their ideas and their works to a wider international audience.”
OFA 2019 NOMINEES:
Aftermath VR: Euromaidan
Ukraine, 2018, 17 min
Directors Alexey Furman, Sergiy Polezhaka
Interactive Experience
On February 20, 2014 in Kyiv Ukrainian government police forces opened fire with live ammunition against protesters armed with bats and makeshift wooden shields. Fifty people were killed in the bloodshed. Viewers of the experience retrace the same path protesters took as they reclaimed the street from police forces, recreated using photogrammetry and CGI. They explore the story through archival footage, 360 video interviews with eyewitnesses and scanned artifacts from the Euromaidan.
Code of Freedom 1991 // Laisves Kodas 13
Lithuania, 2018, 10 min
Director Andrius Lekavicius
Producers Bartoh Polonski, Andrius Lekavicius
Interactive Experience
Code of Freedom 1991 is a 10-minute virtual reality experience, in which a user enters the bloodshed at Vilnius TV tower on January 13th 1991 as a journalist with a camera, and has to make the toughest decisions of conflict journalism — to either film and make evidence of the Soviet army’s aggression, or to help wounded, peaceful protesters. Using archive audio and animated environment based on real events, the VR experience will create a documentary where the users can make their own decisions.
RocketMan 360
Romania, 2018, 20 min
Director Millo Simulov
Producer Gabriela Hirit
Cast: Monica Odagiu, Anghel Damian
360 Fiction Film
In the cockpit of his spaceship, an astronaut receives a 360-degree home movie from his girlfriend, just a few minutes before blasting off as one of the first colonists being sent to Mars to begin terraforming. The astronaut will not see his girlfriend again, and the earth may soon be unliveable. Rocketman360 is a sweet and sentimental final-generation love letter to an astronaut ready for a noble, dangerous mission.
TheatreVR. Kalevala.Episodes
Russia, Finland, 2018, 26 min
Director Oleg Nikolaenko
VR Lead&Developer: Daniil Bakalin
Producer Elli Niaria
Interactive Experience, 360 3D Animation Film
VR performance “Kalevala.Episodes” is based on the stories of “Kalevala” — Finnish-Karelian mythological epos and folklore. Project will send you to a fantasy trip into mysterious worlds of Kalevala heroes, ancient culture and atmosphere using modern vision and sound technology, made using 360 3D video, volumetric capture and interactive scenes.
The Metamorphosis VR // VRwandlung
Czech Republic, 2018, 4 min
Director Mika Johnson
Interactive Experience
Interactive exhibition based on a famous book by Franz Kafka. Wake up in the virtual world as Gregor Samsa, not only late for work but transformed into a giant insect. Experience the alienation of Kafka’s classic text by being immersed in the hyper-realistic body of an insect — with six legs, mandibles, and antenna — and surrounded by Gregor’s possessions: books, papers, and drawers filled with items that you can only explore, as your family members pound on your door, demanding an explanation.
The Wetland
Romania, 2019, 16 min
Director Ioana Mischie
360 Documentary Film
A cinematic VR world archiving the customs and the bitter-sweet archaic stories of the most remote villages of the Delta, who are trying to conserve the wilderness, humanness and profoundness of the wetland despite all odds.
Trail of Angels // Angelų Takais
Lithuania, Belarus, 2018, 30 min
Director Kristina Buozyte
Producer Vitalijus Zukas
Meditative VR experience is a tribute to the precursor of multimedia artists — the most notorious Lithuanian creator M.K. Čiurlionis. This work invites the viewer to explore immersive Afterlife World based on M.K. Čiurlionis paintings and music, observing and interacting with the stunning surroundings. Starting a journey as a human being, the viewer soon realizes that he’s an Angel who contemplates the states of Life, Death and mergence with the Universe.
Unparallel Reality
Belarus, 2019, 6 min
Director Mitya Sorkin
VR artists Pavel Lukashevich, Lisa Belay
Three of four Belarusians have experienced domestic violence in their family life. VR film helps to turn inside out one of many terrible moments in six families, who experienced physical, sexual, economic, psychological abuse. Using Tilt Brush animation, artists immerses the viewer into different types of domestic violence, which are based on a real cases registered by National hotline.
