And the winner of the 2011 Greenpeace film competition is...

Posted by Richardg — 23 November 2011 at 12:37pm - Comments

...Johannes Laidler and Andreas Borlinghaus for Pretending!

Last night film makers from across Europe gathered at the Curzon Soho in central London, with one question on their minds: who had won the Greenpeace Film Competition?

We'd challenged people to make short films that exposed how Volkswagen was misleading the public - claiming to be eco-friendly whilst lobbying against key climate laws. We'd only given filmmakers two weeks - and the response was an astounding eighty films. After weeks of voting, that was whittled down to a shortlist of twelve.

In an award ceremony to rival the Oscars - but with a lower budget and shorter acceptance speeches - we gave out three awards, each with an amazing trophy made from recycled Volkswagen parts by Daniel Harding of HotPod. (I'm told by a colleague that they were camshafts and pistons.)

Angela Trevino and Christian H. Clark won the Audience Award for their film Piñata, having received the most votes from the public. Thomas Ceringy's Think Blue: Comedy, got a Special Mention award from our judges for its technical brilliance and its skillful parody of VW's Think Blue: Symphony advert.

But the grand prize went to Johannes Laidler and Andreas Borlinghaus, for the brilliantly funny Pretending. Andreas and Johannes have won a £5,000 budget to make a campaign film for us. We're really excited about seeing what they come up with.

We didn't realise until we met them that not only are they great filmmakers, but they're still in high school - and had skipped school to travel to the awards ceremony from Germany. I reckon they've got a pretty good excuse - let's hope their headmaster agrees.

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