Once upon a time, there was an oblong asteroid, named Brasilia, gravitating between Mars and Jupiter, discovered by a French astronomer at the end of the 19th century. Once upon a time, there was red laterite earth from which an ideal city bearing the same name was extracted in a thousand days, under the supervision of Oscar Niemeyer between 1956 and 1960, and whose refined architecture favoured triangles with opposing peaks, to capture the telluric and cosmic energies. The Brazilian capi-tal is a “cosmo-futurist” utopia become reality, which has attracted a spate of cults (masonic, spiritualist, etc.), inspired writers such as Clarice Lispector—for whom it represented “the heart of [her] dreams”—, in which the Esperanto invented by Ludwik Zamenhof is spoken, as if this abstract city, rising out of nowhere, considered itself as the new Babel of humanity. Woven together from texts, archives and encounters, A Machine to Live In is an ambitious film-essay in which Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke invent a fascinating documentary cosmology on the genesis and potential futures of this city that is absolutely unique in the world.

"…I find it extraordinary that young men died there in a war that long ago, and then died in the same place three thousand years after that." Mistress is a video art project that began with the reading of "Wittgenstein’s Mistress", an experimental novel published in the US in 1988 after its author, David Markson, received 54 rejections from different publishers.In the process, it turned into a feature-length film. The film begins after the end of the world, the end of all living beings –humans, insects, and any creature that once crawled upon the earth. Yet this apocalypse is of no interest to us, we neither know nor care about its cause. After the end, everything remains: the knickknacks, the machines, the matches, the paintings and the books. The myths and anecdotes – these latter remain in the head of the only creature alive, a woman of a certain and uncertain age, which they inhabit together with past pain and a certain humor of her here and now. She is the mistress of the universe, “appointed the curator of all the world”. As her fingers execute stream-of-consciousness typing, the woman’s thoughts revisit the same places, people and stories time and again, remixing them in different ways with the music she hears, if only in her head. The images mix, too: the site of Troy and footage of World War II, ancient Greek columns and her own laundry, and many of the seas of the world. And very particularly, writing: writing as in the early journalistic moving images; as in the notes traced in their scores by the hands of composers like Bach or Schubert; the letters in the notes and missives of Akhmatova, Rilke, and others; lines drawn in pencil on paper in the drawings of Modignliani or Jeanne Hébuterne or on the beach with a stick..

Jury Declaration:

The male gaze and the nude tour an emptied planet where all that remains is history. Its female voice, delivered in innovative dialogic essay form, knits and builds the personal idiosyncrasies and reflections of well-known historic figures, musicians, artists and philosophers into a complex and intimate memorial knowledge system.

Director Statement:

First of all, Mistress and I are honored by the festival´s and the jury´s attentive gaze, and thankful for the award. I will just add that a side-line in the film is a certain focus on the possibility of a physicality, a sensuality even, when one is all alone in the world; be it a real or imaginary aloneness, be it a male or female physicality, in the great scheme of things, those differences are incidental. Human desires are not, be they the need to live within the body or leave signs in the world.

A metaphorical narrative in which the character is left alone at his post indefinitely to ponder the existential. In his hopefulness he resorts to a mystical exploration.

Jury Declaration:

An American reflection on surveillance and seclusion that acknowledges and deftly flips its formalist and beat generation precedents into contemporary spent forms of looking.

Director Statement:

The jury frames itself with the first three award winners conjuring various notions of the future, my film included. They are not absolutely dystopian futures yet unsettle any sense of comfortably understanding where we are now. Making North Star allowed me to make my unease in 2020 tangible. The philosopher, Ernst Bloch, saw utopia as potential realization of the possible and hope as a means of getting there. The obverse, hopelessness, leaves us trapped in the present. That is the dilemma of the film’s character.