Jury Awards
Mimesis Documentary Festival 2022
August 17, 2022
https://www.mimesisfestival.org/2022-awards
Jury Announcement
Best Documentary
Huahua’s Dazzling World and its Myriad Temptations
by Daphne Xu
In the past decade, humans have developed completely new lives on the internet, a strange and sometimes terrifying facet of reality that cinema has struggled to evoke. Huahua’s Dazzling World and Its Myriad Temptations by Daphne Xu rises to the challenge. As it peers through the illusory filters of livestreaming apps and incisively processes its own embodied camera, this precise and peculiar film births an invigorating new language to befit the spirit of its charismatic star.
In this film, Xu gives her subject and her “star” the chance to shape her identity, to perform her own life on a screen she has created herself. Xu shows us that Huahua has found agency with her cell phone. She defines her own parameters for beauty. She makes us think about the struggles of urban life in China, while also transcending these challenges through the construction of a new, totally self-confident internet identity.
Huahua’s Dazzling World and Its Myriad Temptations offers a critical yet poetic portrayal of the rapid urban transformations in the Xiongan New Area and the socio-political economy of live-streaming through the everyday life stories, challenges, and triumphs of Huahua, the matriarch of the family. The film gently and powerfully creates a portal into the virtual, the social, and the familial notions of intimacy, domestic violence, and refusals of normative ideals of beauty and empowerment. The economic challenges of Huahua in the midst of the urban development projects in the Xiongan New Area facing the violence of infrastructural developments in her surroundings, reverberates with the revelation of domestic violence in her intimate life. Daphne Xu beautifully reveals the complexities of this entanglement throughout the film.
August 2022
Best Short Documentary
Dreams
Under Confinement
By Christopher Harris
With its intricately constructed montage, Dreams Under Confinement by Christopher Harris floods the senses and echoes long past its short runtime.
The film is a condensed and powerful experience of how disjointed and disembodied the surveillance machine of the carceral state sees, others, and criminalizes Black and Brown bodies. Christopher Harris’ multi-layered and complex audiovisual editing becomes a critical catalyst to deconstruct the power structures behind the production of surveillance machinery of the police state. In order to dismantle this carceral state, one has to claim authorship of its visual regimes of surveillance and Christopher Harris does an excellent job in claiming the right to look.
Christopher Harris has created a haunting tour-de-force short film that challenges us to think about the carceral state, racial profiling, satellite surveilance, policing and our contemporary notions of public and private space. With an extraordinary editing style, the film moves quickly yet the ideas within it are so strong you won’t be able to forget anything that you saw or heard.
Emerging Artist
Declarations
of Love
By Tiff Rekem
Documentary Arts
Convergence
By Ama Gisèle
Mission Zero Prize
The Lowland
By Aidin Halalzadeh and Sepideh Salarvand
