Vintage video inspires original music in MashUp Film Festival competition winning entry

The competition

The MashUp Film Festival 2018 organisers, who believe in the notion of sharing, participating and experiencing culture  together and introducing the mashup phenomenon to an international audience, ran a short film competition as part of this year’s festival. The theme - ‘Utopia, Dream and Diversion’.

Entrants were invited to create films using material made available to the festival by Europeana Collections and the French National Centre of Cinematography and the Moving Image (CNC). Approach, format and style were all up to the individual’s creativity.

The entries

33 films were submitted for the contest.

Five finalists had their films shown at the award ceremony at the Cinéma Le Méliès in Montreuil, all vying for the prize for Best Film.

The jury

Experts from content providers and film production.

Virginie Lacoste, producer at ARTE Studio
Emeric de Lastens, film advisor at the Drac Île-de-France.
Antonio Maria Da Silva, film director
Jérôme Lefdup, film director
Alexandre Blain from LaCinetek
Aleksandra Strzelichowska from Europeana Foundation

The winning film

The jury unanimously selected 'Digital Girl Dream Opera' by Aurelio Càrdenas as the winning film. The jury members were really impressed by the director’s capacity to create something totally new from the archive material and for the great work with the music.    

Digital Girl Dream Opera (Aurelio Cárdenas) / Prix Mashup Film Festival 2018 from Aurelio Cardenas on Vimeo.

An interview with Aurelio, the winning filmmaker

Aurelio: I would like to thank the MashUp Festival, the jury and the spectators for this unexpected prize! The award will encourage me to continue creating mashup videos and other audiovisual projects.

Europeana: So, Aurelio, where did the inspiration for this film come from?

Aurelio: I created the movie starting with one fragment: the image of a woman on a videophone who mimics the tone of a phone ("tut tut tut ..."). Repeating this sound loop, I composed a piece of minimalist music that I then combined with images. I realised a kind of imaginary opera, illustrated almost exclusively by images of women performing (in beauty contests, dance shows, parades).

Europeana: And what was your experience of working with archival material from Europeana Collections?

Aurelio: It is very interesting material because of its extreme variety - in both themes and format. I downloaded about 30 clips that I watched before selecting a dozen for my film. The diversity of the material allows you to imagine an infinity of films with very different tones (comic, dramatic, historical, erotic, scientific ...).

Europeana: Do you often use openly licensed content in your work?

Aurelio: As an audiovisual documentalist, I sometimes use freely licensed content during my search for images for financial reasons but also for their documentary interest. As a videographer, too, I like reworking existing openly licensed images, and putting them in offbeat, often musical contexts.

More information

For more information on the MashUp Festival, go to mashup-film-festival.com