The winners of the 3rd Edition of the 'Gjon Mili' International Video Art Festival are announced

2025-10-02 17:54:00, Kulturë CNA

The winners of the 3rd Edition of the 'Gjon Mili' International Video

The winners of the third edition of the 'Gjon Mili' International Video Art Festival have been announced. This year, it took place in three separate cultural spaces: Korça, Dhërmi and Manhattan.

The festival honored artists in the categories of video art & experimental, animation, performance, virtual reality, and documentary. The winning works came from the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Iran/United Kingdom, and Canada, bringing a vibrant mosaic of artistic and cultural perspectives.

Video Art & Experimental Award: E leni Mylonas (United States) – SeaMonster II

Eleni Mylonas, a multidisciplinary artist living between New York and Athens, was honored with the Video Art & Experimental award. She is a Fulbright scholar and graduate of Columbia University, and has exhibited at important institutions such as MoMA PS1 in New York and the Benaki Museum in Athens.

The winning work, SeaMonster II, uses objects collected on the shores of Aegina, nets, plastics and discarded fragments of human life – transforming them into ritual and performative elements. In this way, Mylonas turns environmental waste into a poetic testimony to the relationship between man and nature.

The winners of the 3rd Edition of the 'Gjon Mili' International Video

Best Animated Film Award: Aria Wolf (Germany) – Lichtung

The award for Best Animated Film went to German artist Aria Wolf for her VR project, Lichtung. Born in 1996, Wolf studied transmedia directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.
Lichtung offers an immersive experience: a luminous world that remains silent until the viewer enters it. With each step, the environment awakens, revealing hidden light and wonders. This project demonstrates the power of animation when combined with virtual reality technology.

Best Short Film Award: Bea de Visser (Netherlands) – No Horses on Mars

Dutch artist and director Bea de Visser won the Best Short Film award for her work No horses on Mars. She began her career in the 1980s as a performance and sound artist and is known for her poetic visual and digital language.
The film unfolds as a journey from the perspective of a horse, reflecting on the way humans measure and study them as objects. However, through the cinematic language, sparks of individuality emerge that challenge the boundaries of domestication.

The winners of the 3rd Edition of the 'Gjon Mili' International Video

Best Short Documentary Award: Parham Ghalamdar (Iran/UK) – The Sight is a Wound

The award for Best Short Documentary went to Parham Ghalamdar, an Iranian artist based in the UK. His practice spans painting, film and writing, blending history, mythology and futurism.

The winning film, The Sight is a Wound, is a visual elegy on the limits of the image in the face of contemporary atrocities. In response to the genocide in Gaza, the artist burned over 50 of his previously exhibited paintings, reducing them to ashes. This painful act is a reflection on silence, despair and the limitation of visual language in the age of digital oversaturation.

Audience Award: Brian R Donnelly (Canada) – Goin' Down The Road

The Audience Award went to Canadian artist Brian R Donnelly for his project Goin' Down The Road. Based in Toronto, Donnelly has an international career that began with painting and, since 2017, has also included video works.
The project recreates the city of Toronto through film fragments, archives and contemporary footage, creating a portrait of the city as both real and imaginary.

The winners of the 3rd Edition of the 'Gjon Mili' International Video

The 2025 edition of the International Video Art Festival showed that video art remains one of the most powerful languages ??of art today. From poetic experimentation to virtual reality, from documentary to animation, the winning artists opened new paths of seeing and feeling, connecting different cultures and worlds.

The festival continues through October 4 with artist talks and Q&A sessions at the Producers Club Theatres, Manhattan, New York, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM local time.