September 30th and October 1st, De Kino Short Film Festival took place in Kyiv at the premises of FILM.UA Studio, hosted for the first time jointly by FILM.UA Group and 1+1 Media. Nearly seven thousand people visited the event for its two days. The prize fund of the festival amounted UAH 110 000.
The festival was open with the dancing performance from Apache Crew and a welcoming speech by the festival hosts.
“I am sure that De Kino Festival will not only allow to find new talents, but also inspire those of us who understand that Ukrainian film industry is worth supporting”, - said Oleksandr Tkachenko, CEO of 1+1 Media.
“When we announced the beginning of the festival, we said “don’t be afraid of making the first step”, and people showed us they are not. The works we saw encourage us to believe that the cinema will go on. I believe it will”, - said Sergey Sozanovsky, co-founder of FILM.UA Group.
35 short-listed short films were shown at the festival, selected from more than 300 submissions, shrinking further to five winner movies selected by the jury.
The winner in the Webisode nomination became the movie called “Left Dress!” by the team of Stepan Kulina, Halyna Tsehelyk, and Rostyslav Holovko.
There were as many as two winners in the Cellphone Movie nomination: Albert Morozov with his movie called “Nelly and Me” and Nazar Semkiv with his movie “The Melody”.
The best “trailer for your own series” was selected to be the movie by Anton Yakovenko called “I See You”.
The jury decided not to award anyone in the “Famous Movie Remake” nomination.
The Festival Grand-Prix was given to Mykyta Lyskov with his movie “I Bought a Bike”.
The winners of all the nominations each received a remuneration amounting UAH 15 000, the Grand-Prix holder received UAH 50 000 and a certificate for an individual copyright consultation from “Vasil Kisil & Partners” law firm.
A special jury award was given to a family studio “Spider Film” for active participation in the festival – the studio had submitted as many as seven works for the competition.
A FILM.UA Group special award was given to the authors of the film “Subway to Troyeshchyna” Artem Berkalov and Ihor Sudakov.
“With this festival we opened one more door for the talented and gave them an opportunity, nearly two hundred content makers used that door and we have selected the best ones. Our short-list of 35 videos amazed us both with the quality of the content itself, and the beauty of the image, and the emotional component, and the ideas and messages brought home to the audience in such a small runtime. Some of them are typical digital projects, and some are worth bringing to other platforms and other forms of embodiment. In general, we saw, we distinguished and we awarded promising authors. They are not many, but they still are, and we will hold that door open for them,” – said Iryna Kostiuk, co-chair of the festival jury and FILM.UA Group’s producer.
“The majority of videos presented within the final competition of the festival are works that could only appear in the 21st century. These movies could not be here 15-20 years ago: you could see that from the cinematographic language used, from the style of storytelling, from the courageous juxtaposition of cinematographic devices. We are particularly pleased to have seen that these weren’t mostly by film school graduates, these were mostly films by young enthusiast who have trusted the festival”, - said Olena Vasylieva, co-chair of the festival jury, main producer of series and films of 1+1 Channel.
The two day long festival program was full of lectures and master classes. There were meetings with the festival’s special guests – Polish producer Dariusz Jablonski and Olexiy Smolyar, the Ukrainian director working in the U.S. for many years already. 5 vymir and Pianoboy have performed on the outdoor stage.
