We are almost there! Another year has gone by and the 69th Berlin International Film Festival is about to start. Before we begin sharing more details concerning the contributions of 2019 with you, we want to know how the winners of last year’s competition have been spending the time after their success in 2018.
Let’s start with Ines Moldavsky, who won the Golden Bear for the Best Short Film 2018 with The Men Behind the Wall.
How has life been since last year’s Berlinale Shorts?
I got to travel to many festivals all around the world to screen the film, and received great feedback from different audiences, of all ages, genders and nationalities. The film touched many people. It is highly exciting for me, to see how people who never lived the local political reality in Israel can still understand the film and identify with it; it seems the film actually deals with universal subjects which are very much on today’s agenda. I have also started running workshops at different art institutions where I got to present my earlier films. It is very encouraging to see how recognition of one of my films creates a new opportunity for earlier works, which haven’t got much attention until that moment.
What did winning the award mean to you personally?
After so many years of being a starving-independent-subversive-experimental-struggling artist, it’s great to know that people can actually relate to my crazy ideas. There are soooooo many points during the process of making a film you say to yourself „I am fucking crazy. Why am I doing this? No one will ever get it“. So it’s great to know that people got it, it gives power to keep on going, to proceed with my artistic journey. Although I am still a struggling artist. Because art is always a struggle – both emotionally, because you are constantly analyzing yourself and your surroundings, and economically, because there is never enough funding. Especially today, especially in Israel, especially with the current Minister of Culture, it is practically impossible to get funding for the type of films I make. But luckily enough, I have a very ascetic type of personality, so I am willing to keep struggling, and will continue in pursuing my creative ideas, even if everyone thinks I’m crazy, like they did in Israel when I was making this film.
What are your plans for 2019?
I am working simultaneously on another experimental documentary film and on a script for a fiction feature film. The documentary deals with gender roles in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychiatry, examining the diagnosis called Borderline Personality Disorder and its similarities to the fabled female hysteria. Yes, this one doesn’t deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but like in my previous film it deals with power relations between both genders, trying to expose injustices in current society, and once again using my own autobiographic story and persona. The feature film is a long-term project, and it deals with a young Israeli woman who wants to immigrate away from Israel because she is sick of the political reality, but doesn’t seem to succeed in getting a European passport, so in the meantime she drowns her sorrow in compulsive binge-eating and casual sexual encounters with the different macho types present in contemporary Israeli society, in which the gender roles are highly influenced by militarism.
At the 2019 edition of Berlinale Shorts, 24 films from 17 countries will be competing for the Golden and Silver Bear, the Audi Short Film Award (endowed with 20,000 euros) and a nomination as “Berlin Short Film Candidate for the European Film Awards 2019”.
Berlinale Shorts 