straight 8 Competition Winners Announced at Ciclope Festival

straight 8 @ Ciclope premiered last week at Kino International in Berlin as part of Ciclope International Festival of Craft. It was the very first time anyone – including the filmmakers – had seen the films, and the winners were chosen by a democratic vote.

The winners were:

- Moonwalk Films (France) scooped first place with their film ‘Woman Potion’; and are donating their £1000 prize pot to End Female Genital Mutilation.

- CAB Films (South Africa) placed second with ‘Drive Wire’. Their £500 prize is going to Primere Skool Philipvale, a primary school based in the same location, in the South African desert, where Drive Wire was filmed.

- CINE (Brazil) took third with ‘Life is Beautiful’, and are donating their £250 prize to Casa Do Zezinho,  a charity supporting orphaned children in Brazil.

The audience award, determined by the loudest reaction to a film, went to Radical Media / Hilow Films for their film ‘Lockdown’. 

All of the films will be released online over the coming days.

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Presented by the APA, in association with Cinelab London and CICLOPE Festival, the straight 8 industry shootout is a global industry battle – a company to company showdown – to produce the best film on one super 8 cartridge, without editing or post-production according to straight 8’s strict rules.

ALL of the films - good, bad or ugly - will be screened for the very first time, even to their makers, at 17.30, October 26th, at Kino International, Berlin as part of the CICLOPE International Festival of Craft.

16 companies, from 13 countries and 5 continents took up the challenge: 

WCRS (lon, uk), EL RIO (buenos aires, arg), ELECTRIC THEATRE COLLECTIVE (lon, uk), FRAMESTORE PICTURES (culver city, usa), BLACK RABBIT (warsaw, pol), SMUGGLER (lon, uk), THE LIFT (mexico city, mex), RED RAGE (dublin, ire), STELLAR FILMS (tallinn, estonia), MOONWALK (paris, fra), TFC JAPAN (tokyo, japan), SMILE (barcelona, esp), CINE BRAZIL (sao paolo, bra), CZAR (amsterdam, hol), CAB FILMS (cape town, south africa), RADICAL MEDIA (lon, uk)

There’s no creative brief, so anything could happen. Audience vote will decide the winners and the winning companies donate prize-money to the charities of their choosing.

straight 8 began in 1999 when director Ed Sayers asked friends to have a go at making a short film on one cartridge of super 8 each - with no waste, at a 1:1 shooting ratio. The films were screened in London’s West End to a packed audience, projecting off Super 8 with the audio playing from cassettes. No-one saw their films in advance.

Since 2003 straight 8 has held premieres at Cannes Film Festival, receiving 100-200 entries for every annual open competition. straight 8 has also enjoyed stints on Channel 4 broadcast TV.

The straight 8 industry shootout is an ad-industry incarnation of the competition running in Cannes in 2016 and 2017 during the ad festival and now at CICLOPE. This version is open to any companies working in the ad industry, to compete as companies, for charity.