Every year at the Kortfilmfestival in Leuven, the VAF Wildcards are awarded, the prizes for the best final works at Flemish film schools. The winners of the 2023 VAF Wildcards are Orange Flavored Love by Angela Alsouliman, Oxide by Emma Emily Daelman, Kaalkapje by Marthe Peters and Le tarantole dormono sotto le pietre by Giada Cicchetti.

The VAF Wildcards are the country’s biggest film awards and a springboard to a career as a professional filmmaker or screenwriter. In NW, we invite the winners and look at their work.

The VAF Wildcard Fiction 2023 goes to Orange Flavored Love by Angela Alsouliman (30′), a master film from KASK School of Arts.

Orange Flavored Love is a sensory fiction drama full of smiles, colors and smells. In Mosul, Nawal cares for her ailing mother Samia. The mother’s condition worsens as medicine is no longer available in the city. In the few days she has left, Nawal, her mother and their neighbor share small moments of joy. The ladies sing and dance, they use makeup and make fragrances, they tell jokes and laugh too loudly. In the midst of disease, poverty and war, they manage to turn something terrible into something joyous and create beauty where ugliness strikes.

The VAF Wildcard Animation 2023 goes to Oxide by Emma Emily Daelman (6′), a master film from RITCS School of Arts.

Oxide tells the story of two beings who cross paths in an abandoned bus shelter. With fear and caution, they seek rapprochement. A search for intimacy ensues as they grapple with the blurred lines between connection and separation.

The VAF Wildcard Documentary 2023 goes to Kaalkapje by Marthe Peters (25′), a master film from KASK School of Arts.

In Kaalkapje, twenty years after surviving childhood cancer, the filmmaker looks back through the lens of her father’s handycam at a period of which she has no memory. In diary-like fragments, she resists the idea of illness as a metaphor and looks for things that make her happy to be alive.

The VAF Wildcard Filmlab 2023 goes to Le tarantole dormono sotto le pietre by Giada Cicchetti (27′), a master film from the photography (fine arts) program at KASK School of Arts.

The film is inspired by a ritual that originated in southern Italy in the Middle Ages: Tarantismo, a traditional magical-religious practice for curing people, especially women, who suffered from convulsive movements attributed to the bite of a tarantula. The maker films her mother, weaving an intergenerational dialogue about motherhood, daughterhood and womanhood. At the same time, she traces in southern Italy the traces of this ancient ritual and its evolution to the present day.