AWARDS
2026
Screendance
Award
Scottish Ballet
Best International
Short Dance Film
Field Recordings from Oblivion
Spain, 2025
Director, Choreography: Ferran Gordillo Palahí
Special Mention
Organising Principles of Experience
UK, 2025
Director: Gabriela Tropia
Choreography: MayaAI_V6
Special Mention
Bubbling Baby
The Netherlands, 2025
Director: Sharine Rijsenburg
Audience
Award
Madame Booty Therapy
Germany, 2025
Director: Lucca Fordham, Sabrina Argoub
Choreography: Maïmouna Coulibaly
Outstanding Achievement
in Dance Film Award
Invisible People
France, Germany, 2023
Director: Alisa Berger
Portrait of a
Generation Award
Magyar Menyegző (Hungarian Wedding)
Hungary, 2026
Director: Káel Csaba
Choreography: Zoltán Zsuráfszky
Best Dance Sequence in a Series or Feature Film
Choreography: Belén Martí Lluch
(La Bola Negra; La Mesías; Superstar)
Statement Field Recordings from Oblivion
We propose Field Recordings from Oblivion for “Best International Short Dance Film” for bringing choreography, cinematography, editing, and sound into a coherent and immersive vision.
Editing is embedded in the choreography. Movement, duration, body placement, and camera have been conceived together.
The camera becomes a body in relation to the dancers. Movement is fragmented and reassembled, surprising the viewer while preserving choreographic clarity.
The dancers bring a presence that makes the movement deeply human. Sound design amplifies the film’s physical and dramaturgical impact.
The film makes us experience dance through cinema. Movement extends beyond the body to the camera, editing, sound, and the viewer’s gaze. This integration of choreographic and cinematic thinking is why we propose it for this prize.
Beyond its complexity, the film reflects on memory, oblivion, and the digital age. In a time when everything seems recorded, the film asks what it means to forget.
Statement Organising Principles of Experience
This is a film that stayed with us and, understandably, gave us plenty to talk about. A well-executed, great idea. What stood out wasn’t just that the film was made with AI; it’s the how that mattered. Filmmaker Gabriela Tropia directed the film using AI as her preferred tool, in the same way other directors decide to shoot on film, digital or mixed media. What she did was something pretty extraordinary and worth highlighting: she brought Maya Deren back to life to have a conversation with her, creating films within the film. In a world of AI slop, this feels genuinely groundbreaking, giving us a sense of what a creative collaboration between AI and humans could be: one where AI empowers human creativity rather than taking anything away.
Statement Bubbling Baby
Special mention to Bubbling Baby, which resonates first as an act of documentary filmmaking: the ability to render a music genre as embodied memory, without ever loosening its formal rigour. The film traces bubbling — a high-energy music and dance genre born in 1990s Rotterdam within Caribbean-Dutch communities, at the crossing of dancehall, reggae and electronic beats — through a mosaic of DJ flyers, danced club sequences and female voices in which the genre’s full pulse comes through.
What strikes the jury is the director’s gaze: culture is passed down through women, in what the film calls “a kind of flair, of vibration”, a sensory inheritance, written into the body before it is narrated. The butt dance becomes a political gesture before it is a choreographic one: a quiet claim to a belonging denied, and simultaneously a wider meditation on what it means to belong to newly emerging cultures, born of encounter and displacement.
The direction stands out for its sharp visual language and precise camera work, carving out a space, at once physical and sonic, in which the body can fully inhabit the screen. Through the voices of several female DJs and a choreographer, Bubbling Baby steps outside the rhetoric of resistance alone: it claims for its community an equal right to joy and healing, without needing to justify itself through a purely political or anthropological lens. A documentary both rigorous and intimate, a necessary portrait of a culture that dances to survive, and survives by dancing.
