Erste Bank Film Award 2025
This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Erste Bank Film Award, initiated and sponsored by Erste Bank in collaboration with the Viennale, the German House at NYU and the Anthology Film Archives.
The winners are selected by an independent jury from among the Austrian film productions presented at the Viennale. The film award enables the winners to stay in New York City, where they will present their work at the renowned Anthology Film Archives.
Jury: Silvia Bohrn (cultural manager), Nicolas Mahler (comic artist, artistic director of the School of Poetry), Boris Manner (philosopher, curator), Jed Rapfogel (curator, Anthology Film Archives)
The Erste Bank Film Award goes to two winners:
Erste Bank Film Award – Vermehrt Schönes! Laureates Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter (WHITE SNAIL) | © Viennale/ Alexi Pelekanos
White Snail
D: Elsa Kremser, Levin Peter
Austria, Germany 2025
Jury Statement
WHITE SNAIL is a film about two outsiders who could hardly be more different. Masha is training to be a model in order to escape the dreary everyday life in Minsk, while Misha works in a morgue. The two find each other in an unusual way and a fragile love affair develops in which beauty and death – Eros and Thanatos – are closely intertwined. The world in which the two protagonists find themselves is cold and hostile to the feelings they develop for each other. In sensitively crafted encounters, brilliantly embodied by the two actors, a love affair grows that obscures the differences in the characters' backgrounds, ages and life plans. Strong contrasts and symbolic images take the audience on a fairytale journey with the couple. After night-time walks through Minsk, the narrative culminates in an almost mystical forest excursion, where the contradictory feelings of the two reach their climax. The film manages to portray the emotions sensitively but also directly and never becomes boring.
The protagonists, both appearing as actors for the first time, impress with their commanding presence and authenticity. WHITE SNAIL is a film in tune with the times – refreshing and honest. It depicts a hostile external world and a fragile internal world in a manner that is both sombre and hopeful. Within this world, the challenge is to survive and find one's own path.
Erste Bank Film Award – Vermehrt Schönes! Laureate Viktoria Schmid (ROJO ŽALIA BLAU) | © Viennale/ Alexi Pelekanos
Rojo Žalia Blau
D: Viktoria Schmid
Austria 2025
Jury Statement
Viktoria Schmid's ROJO ŽALIA BLAU is a landscape study filmed in the forests and on the coasts of Spain, Lithuania and Lower Austria, using a simple but evocative technique: colour separation (the basis of the Technicolor process from Hollywood's Golden Age), in which the same scene is filmed in black and white using three different colour filters and then printed through those same filters to create a full spectrum of visible colours. However, because Schmid photographs the same film strip three times in succession – rather than simultaneously, as in ‘real’ Technicolor – she creates an extraordinary, astonishing visual experience in which the colours appear synchronous or asynchronous depending on the extent of movement within the landscape or between shots.
The film's technique is far more than a formal experiment: it essentially becomes a way of photographing time, with three different temporalities superimposed in a single (intoxicating) image and made visible only by the movement of wind, waves, sun and shadows. Due to its astonishing fusion of colour, movement, time and philosophical inquiry, ROJO ŽALIA BLAU also has a special resonance in an era in which it has become particularly important to explore the space between ‘truth’ and image.