final report 2006

The 2nd International Budapest Short Film Festival (BuSho 2006) outshined the previous year in every accept. We got almost twice as many entries (over 200 shorts from about 20 countries) until 4. June, which caused many difficulties mainly to the pre-jury, because the 5-member international jury saw only a selection of the best films. Naturally the 3-day program lasting 15 hours caused headache to either the jury or the Student Jury (latter present at BuSho for the first time). The most important change were the fantastic „braimstormings” at the end of each day where the jury, student –jury and the filmmakers had quite hard disputes about the films. The result was on the faces of the people leaving the small hall: „We had a good conversation about it!”. The international meeting did not have linguistic difficulties at all, if English and Hungarian weren’t enough to make things clear we started to use our new invention: „hunglish”, which was clear to everyone.

Our press campaign was a great success, many say too great… It’s true: we weren’t prepared to a such big „attack” of the press, radio, television. Of course, we accepted the challange and we tried to answer the questions of every reporter. The host of the film-magazine of one of the leading radio stations said he never saw that a festival organized for the second time having so many advertisements.  Our TV spot was projected on Duna TV, TV2 and Filmmuseum channels and we had some interviews on Hír TV, MTV1, Echo and FixTV. You could hear our voices at Club, Budapest, Radio Cafe, Petőfi, Civil, Info and Catholic radios.. There were many-many precious articles in the electric and printed press, but I would like to outline some- many thanks to the authors of the articles: Vox, Filmvilág, Pesti Est, film.hu, Népszabadság, Litera.hu. The day of the distribution of the prizes was hard concerning the press matters: some media organs asked us to tell them the the title and the name of the winner before closing-date. But there was  a small problem: there was one hour left until the end of the projections and the start of the final decision-making process!

Excuse Me! I told a lie at the start of my report. We didn’t manage the outshine rhe previous BuSho in every aspect, there was one exception: the budget. I am not going to start to complain, I would like to thank IVF and MMKA for the financial back-up, and Czech Centre, UPC and Duna Television for the help. I thought it would be a reality, that the great success of last year’s festival gave a prove that there’s big need of such organization. I must admit I was not right. Anyway I hope the visitors and the partecipants of this year’s BuSho are going to inform those who are concerned and finally the short film can get the appreciation it deserves. It is a commonplace that for example the German young filmmakers have infinite possibilities compared with us. Of course it was clear to the Hungarian youngmen, too. One member of the student jury asked us to give him the contact of the Hamburg Media School, because he would like to continue his studies there after the university… So just to summarise the problem: we should have to organize a system, which works!

Of course: after so many positive feedbacks all of the BuSho Team (15 youngsters who proved for the second time) agreed on continuing next year, but there is a „just” at the end of the sentence. Although love is great- and all of us is in love with short film- but love will not pay our phone bills… At the end the winner was Superwash. We hope it is going to have a nice carrier-just like last year’s winner, and this success will confirm the professionalism of the BuSho jury. The list of the winners is on our homepage, thanks everyone, from the filmmakers, through the cook to our Moms!