Ella Raidel is this year's recipient of the Austrian Ministry for Culture's (BMKÖS) Outstanding Artist Award in the category of feature and documentary film.
We happily quote from the jury's statement: "Raidel is an artist who consistently and continuously works at the interface between performative art, documentary film and fiction. Her protagonists are rigorously woven into composed images. They wander between tradition, modernity and the future, through grown cities and replicas, through condemned buildings and postmodern experience culture. (...) Individual narratives, commentaries and historical references merge ontologically with the architecture to form a mental image. In the process, a new, open cinema emerges. A cinema that reflects on the conventions of filmmaking across genres and disciplines." Exemplified most recently in A Pile of Ghosts, which approaches the construction boom in China from an unusual perspective and takes us into ghost towns; this film is still on its international festival tour and has just won the Award of Excellence at the Tokyo Image Forum Festival.
sixpackfilm sends heartfelt congratulations to Ella, whose work we have been accompanying as distributor for many years, and of course to all other award winners as well.
Foto: B. Holub
