On April 20th, the annual Movie Battle was held in Copenhagen, as part of the CPH PIX film festival. The theme for the short films this year was “slasher”.
Founded by film director Shaky Gonzaléz in 2004, the Movie Battle is CPH PIX’s section where Denmark’s underground film making scene tests their muscles in genre cinema. Previous themes include time travel, supernatural horror and post-apocalyptism. This year the theme was slasher films, loosely defined, and six short films lasting up to 19 minutes each entered the competition (listed in the order of the promo still below):
Egomaniac (Svend Plogh Johansen, 7 min)
Selfie (Stefano Gonzalez, 19 min)
The Sun Has Died (Daniel Bødker Sørensen, 18 min)
In The Quiet Depths of the Forest (Andrea E. Lund & Anne E. Stenspil, 11 min)
Harvest (Kim Sønderholm & Martin Sonntag, 18 min)
Bytte (Jesper Pedersen, 13 min)
The jury, consisting of Marie Schmidt Olesen, Martin Barnewitz, Steen Schapiro, Christian Monggaard and Sami Darr, decided over three awards, with a fourth – the Movie Battle Audience Award – coming from the viewers at cinema Dagmar. The jury selected the following winners:
Best SFX: Harvest
Best actor: Marc Ciano in Egomaniac
Best slasher film: The Sun Has Died
Audience award: The Sun Has Died
A DVD release by the battle’s sponsor, Another World Entertainment, was expected but AWE informs that they are not planning a release this time, due to poor sales of previous short film compilations.
Next year’s genre theme will be Westerns, which will be particularly interesting, as it’s one of the least produced film genres in the Nordic region.
CPH PIX is not only about amateur short films; film related concerts, an international New Talent award, an international programme of “thrills & kills” movies such as Creep, Housebound and Stung, three Larry Clark films, and a special focus on Vietnam was part of the April 9 – 22 schedule this year.
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