19 March 2021
Ten Short Films Take a Look into the Future of Energy at the Fifth Foresight Festival
And the winner is: … After an exciting final that was broadcast live from FUTURIUM, this year’s winners of the Foresight Festival’s film competition in the ‘Energy Transition’ category are: ‘Scream for Ice’ by Emir Aytemür, who picked up prize money of 2,000 euros. This was the jury’s choice as best film submission. The public’s choice was the film ‘Stella’ by Angélica Morales Villegas, whose prize comes with a stay on the Northern German island of Pellworm.
Dr Stefan Brandt, the director of Futurium, opened the digital festival with the words: “Foresight Festival and Futurium simply fit together. Both want to encourage people to imagine possible futures with the help of scientific input, artistic inspiration and their own imagination. And both see themselves as platforms for interdisciplinary exchange about these imagined futures. As Robert Jungk said: only those who invent the future in advance can hope to influence it effectively!”
“Digital festivals work too” is how Ilka Bickmann, festival director and chairwoman of science2public – Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftskommunikation, summed things up after the day’s success. She added: “As a result, we had ten film-makers from seven countries around the world as our guests. An exciting journey around the globe and into the future by means of different visions for the global energy transition. Impressive.”
A sense of satisfaction at how well the rest of the programme around the evening film competition had played out could also be felt among the large organisational team, consisting of the festival initiators from science2public and FUTURIUM, and staff and students from the eight partner universities. In the morning, Professor Dominik Wessely from the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF invited schoolchildren to beam themselves into the future with excerpts from “Film, Research, Foresight – When Cinema Dreams of the Future” and to discuss the question of why history is a school subject but the future is not. In seven interactive workshops, the participants could learn about the future, research the future and shape the future themselves. Various experts introduced the participants to foresight as scientific method, techniques for developing scenarios of the future, and the various tools of futurology, helping them create their own future visions on the topic of energy transition.
Another of the day’s highlights was a speed challenge worthy of a game show performed by Carlo Schmid and Paul Haacke from TU Berlin. The inventor duo converted a Schwalbe moped from combustion engine to electric drive in just 60 minutes – proving with a great deal of humour and craftsmanship how each of us can contribute a little bit more to the energy transition and, in this case, the transport revolution of the future.
Save the date
On March 30, the Foresight Festival will enter its second round: as part of the Foresight mid-term conference of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the top ten films on the topic of ‘Changing Our Values’ will be presented. Registration for the conference
At 19:15 a livestream of the film festival will be available.