Winners of the 2nd Edition
For the 2024 e-flux Film Award, the jury has awarded first prize to Noor Abed for A Night We Held Between (2024, 30 minutes), second prize to Taiki Sakpisit for The Spirit Level (2023, 20 minutes), and an honorary mention to Anna Scherbyna for Scales (2024, 13 minutes).
This year, we are also happy to introduce the e-flux Prize for Cinematic Ingenuity, awarded independently by e-flux to a filmmaker who exhibits a uniquely visionary approach to the art of image production. The inaugural award goes to Maryam Tafakory for Mast-del (2023, 17 minutes).
This year’s award ceremony will be held in New York at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, January 16, 2025 at 7pm, featuring screenings of the awarded films and introductions from the award recipients. Get tickets for the award ceremony here.
We also look forward to special screenings of the shortlisted films, to take place in two parts on Saturday, January 25, 2025 at 3pm and 5pm. Please stay tuned for further details.
Shortlisted films
Dhiaa Biya, What else grows on the palm of your hands? (2023, 16 minutes)
Kara Ditte Hansen, Semi-Precious (2024, 15 minutes)
Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutman, Vents Violents (2024, 20 minutes)
Minki Hong, Paradise (2023, 30 minutes)
Hey-Yeun Jang, live/leave (2024, 14 minutes)
Kyllachy, Insignificant Specks of Dust in a Tapestry of Stars (2024, 8 minutes)
Moojin Brothers, Three Worlds’ Dialogue (2024, 11 minutes)
The 2024 jury was comprised of Saodat Ismailova, Shana Moulton, and Elena Vogman. The 2024 pre-selection committee members, Lukas Brasiskis, Dmitry Frolov, and Steff Hui Ci Ling, presented a shortlist of ten films for the jury’s consideration, selected from an inspiring array of over 800 moving-image works.
e-flux extends its gratitude to all of the artists and filmmakers who entered their work for consideration in this year’s edition, with congratulations to the winners and the shortlisted.
About the Awardees
Noor Abed (1988, Palestine) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. She works at the intersection of performance and film. Through a process of image-making, her works create situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in Νew York in 2015–16, and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut in 2016–17. She was a fellow at the Raw Material Company in Dakar in 2019, and in 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an assistant curator in documenta fifteen, Kassel 2021–22, an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022–24, and was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant in 2022. Her book Stars at Midday was published in October 2024.
Taiki Sakpisit is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Bangkok, renowned for his innovative approach to storytelling and his profound exploration of Thailand’s complex history. Sakpisit unpacks the nation’s turbulent past, infusing his films with a subtle yet resounding political commitment. His works delve into the underlying tensions, conflicts, and anticipations of contemporary Thailand, meticulously crafted through precise and sensorially overwhelming audio-visual assemblage. Utilizing a diverse array of sounds and images, Sakpisit creates immersive experiences that challenge conventional narratives. His feature-length film The Edge of Daybreak won the FIPRESCI prize at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. His recent works have been exhibited at the fourteenth Gwangju Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, the 2024 Bangkok Art Biennale, and the fourteenth Mercosur Biennial.
Anna Scherbyna is a Ukrainian-born artist, filmmaker, and curator based in Berlin. Drawing from her background in painting, Scherbyna integrates a painterly perspective into her filmmaking, expanding her exploration of perceptual modalities to delve beyond the surface of the image. At the intersection of disciplines in her cinematic exploration, she seeks to uncover the unseen and unspoken. Her work consistently examines the margins of representation, embracing disruption and fragmentation as methods to challenge hegemonic narratives.
Maryam Tafakory, born and raised in Iran, works with film and performance. Solo screenings/exhibitions of her work include MoMA (New York), BOZAR (Brussels), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Academy Museum (Los Angeles), Museum of the Moving Image (New York), and LUX London, among others. Selected group events include Tate Modern (London), Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives (New York). She was awarded the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival, the Tiger Short Award at the 51st Rotterdam IFF, and the Best Experimental Film Award at the 70th and 71st Melbourne International Film Festival. She was the 2024 winner of the Film London Jarman Award.
Jury 2024
Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist who came of age in the post-Soviet era in Central Asia. She graduated from Tashkent State Art Institute in Uzbekistan and Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts in France. Her films and video installations have been presented at the Venice Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, documenta fifteen (Kassel), Shanghai Biennial, Berlinale International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, CPH DOX (Copenhagen), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), and Parasite (Hong Kong). Her stage work has appeared at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music, Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), and other venues around the world.
Shana Moulton is a California-born-and-based artist who works in video, performance, and installation. In 2002, Moulton began the video series Whispering Pines, in which she performs as Cynthia, an alter-ego searching for purpose and fulfillment through home decor, self-help paraphernalia, and cosmetic rituals. Moulton has had solo exhibitions at international institutions including Palais De Tokyo in Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work has been featured in Artforum, the New York Times, Art in America, Flash Art, BOMB, and Frieze, among others. Her work has been featured on Art21 and her single-channel videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.
Elena Vogman is a media theorist and independent curator. Since 2021, she directs the research project “Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe” at Bauhaus University Weimar and is a visiting fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Her research focuses on the fields of critical psychiatry, feminist, and postcolonial theory with an emphasis on film and media. She has published in Grey Room, October, and e-flux journal, and is the author of two books: Sinnliches Denken. Eisensteins exzentrische Methode (Sensuous Thinking, Eisenstein’s Eccentric Method, 2018) and Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project (2019). She was a Visiting Professor at the École normale supérieure, Paris, and at New York University Shanghai, and has held postdoctoral positions at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technology and Media Philosophy (IKKM), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and in the DFG project “Rhythm and Projection” at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.
Preselection committee 2024
Lukas Brasiskis is a curator of video and film at e-flux.
Dmitry Frolov is an art and film curator and researcher based in Berlin. From 2017 to 2022, he worked as a curator at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival. He has collaborated with numerous international festivals and cultural institutions, focusing primarily on artists’ moving image.
Steff Hui Ci Ling is a cultural worker, labor researcher, and occasional critic and film programmer living as a guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. She is currently organizing the circulation of an Art Workers’ Inquiry for Decolonial Potential. The Inquiry is concerned with the political tradition of workers’ inquiries and its application in the cultural sector and our labor’s relationship to settler-colonial property.
Previous editions
The inaugural edition of e-flux Film Award was launched in 2023 and juried by Charles Mudede, Anri Sala, and Anocha Suwichakornpong. The preselection of submissions was reviewed by Lukas Brasiskis, Dmitry Frolov, and Steff Hui Ci Ling.
The e-flux Film Award 2023 first prize was awarded to Maurício Chades, Green Cemetery (Brazil, 2023, 25 minutes) and second prize to Eri Saito, May All Your Wounds Heal (Japan, 2021, 5 minutes), with an honorable mention awarded to Bo Wang, An Asian Ghost Story (Hong Kong/The Netherlands, 2023, 37 minutes).
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.