Congratulations to Omer Fast (DD '96) who recently won the German competition of the 2013 Hamburg International Short Film Festival. His film Continuity features the struggles of a fictional German family dealing with their son's return from the war in Afghanistan and employs Fast's signature documentary style that fuses personal accounts, reportages, interviews and reenactments.

The jury wrote: "In a unanimous decision the German Competition's jury is awarding a film that extends a term often considered fundamental to narrative cinema into the political dimension." Fast will receive €2000 for winning the competition.

Since its founding 28 years ago, the Hamburg International Short Film Festival has been celebrating short films as an independent art form, while offering an opportunity for film makers from all over the world to get in touch with an eager audience and with each other. The International Competition mirrors current global aesthetic tendencies and narrative structures. The German Competition offers an overview of the state of the nation's short films and film academies. And in the long-standing and unique No Budget Competition, which formed the festival's origin in 1985, presents works made with little money but plenty of ideas and commitment.

Image: Omer Fast, Continuity (still), 2012. 41 minutes.