award announcement.

There is something haunting yet romantic about this film. What lingers longest is the way it turns something as intimate and fragile as love into a reflection on being watched, being remembered, and perhaps being judged. Through vivid and varied methods, the filmmaker creates complex layers of gaze and voyeurism through both image and sound. The result is deeply compelling, while still carrying an emotional weight that lingers long after the curtain falls.

Beneath its ideas of surveillance and the panopticon lies something much simpler and more human: the desire to be seen by someone, or at least to be recorded; the eagerness to exist while also fearing what another person might see. The beautiful tension between these two impulses creates a meditative space for intimacy, vulnerability, and the complicated ways we look at one another, with or without love.

The film compellingly captures wartime nights in Kharkiv through a group of people working the night shift. The director skillfully combines the reality unfolding before the camera with strong cinematography and storytelling techniques, creating an experience that holds the audience’s attention throughout. The light spilling from the pharmacy into the darkness recalls Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks: mysterious, mesmerizing, and strangely still. Yet the stakes of life and death faced by the people in these two spaces could hardly be more different. As the war in Ukraine continues to this day, Megumi Lim’s Night Shift stands as a witness to its brutality, while at the same time offering viewers a sense of hope: that one day, this too will pass.

We present this award to a film in which we found a profound purity and an unmediated sense of humanity; a film whose camera moves neither from above nor from the outside, but at eye level with its subjects, gradually dissolving the boundary between observer and observed.

Over the course of a long journey, alongside a Qashqai family and amid the difficult conditions of migration and life in the mountains, the filmmaker has become part of their way of life, so much so that, at times, we forget we are watching a film and feel as though we have entered the life of a family.

Through this companionship, the relationship between human beings and nature emerges not merely as a subject, but as a way of understanding existence: a space in which humanity, the filmmaker, and nature are no longer separate, and where love, empathy, and connection take on a deeper meaning.

At a time when we need such a vision of coexistence, empathy, and humanity more than ever, this film reminds us of the possibility of drawing closer once again to one another and to the world of which we are a part. With respect and admiration, we present the International Competition Grand Prize to Temporary Nomad by Valentin Macke.