Award Winner 2017

2017 Healthy Workplaces Film Award winners

Before the bridge | USA | Lewis Wilcox

This is a short documentary film with the mission to spread awareness about how automation will affect the future of humanity. Clear views from a driving car of post-apocalyptic scenarios: ruined factory buildings, dilapidated houses, heavy air. Then: dust-free shots of huge storehouses, robot arms, forklifts. A catalogue of disaster images meets a science fiction fantasy. No Hollywood superlativism but the effects of the automation and robotisation of the working world. The example: Indiana. A fleeting glance at Trump’s America – and the future of the economy.

Website of the film 


Turtle Shells | Germany | Tuna Kaptan

European animal protection laws, German Armed Forces foreign operations and a seized turtle, whose shell was painted with the flag of the Syrian rebels. All converge at a reptile rescue centre in Munich, headed by Dr. Markus Baur. A German army specialist is learning how to deal with dangerous reptiles – he must keep calm, catch, neutralize. Meanwhile, Baur informs the turtle's Syrian owner she's unlikely to get her animal back under European species protection law. A multi perspective film in the midst of glass terrariums exploring the connections between animal, man and war.

 

Special mention

Alien | Türkiye | Morteza Atabaki

And from silence and darkness awakes … an all-moving, all-turning being. White, yellow and golden spindles in vigorous synchronised rotation. Twirling in shiny pirouettes in an old workshop full of nooks and crannies, they spin the big thread, sacrificing themselves. In the midst of the heat and noise of the historic machine souls a hunched old man is working, sometimes a cog, sometimes the conductor.

 

Nominations

  • When the Bull Cried (Belgium, Bolivia, dir. Karen Vázquez Guadarrama, Bart Goossens)
  • Dying Breed (UK, dir. Mick Catmull)
  • Time to Read Poems (South Korea, dir. Soojung Lee)
  • Machines (India, Germany, Finland, dir. Rahul Jain)
  • The Mermaid Kingdom (Mexico, dir. Luiz Rincón)
  • Carbon Nights (Switzerland, dir. Robert Müller)
  • Delta (Ukraine, Germany, dir. Oleksandr Technyskyi)