By Karsten Visarius

The relationship between the church and the cinema is as old as film itself. The Lumière Brothers already filmed not only workers leaving the factory or the arrival of a train, but also made a film about the life and passion of Christ. A short film, of course, the length of one film reel. Everyday observations, impressive technology – and an ancient story, deeply rooted in our memories, one that has moulded the Christian world's conception of itself, while at the same time questioning it time after time after time. Film finds its content everywhere, in what is well-known and familiar or distant and foreign. It has created new spaces, embracing life next door and far away, reality and imagination, outer and inner images. And it is this very interface between the interior and the exterior world that church film work has devoted itself to exploring over several decades. “Behind our eyes, we create our own images”, so the title of a series of essays written in the context of Catholic film work, taking as its theme this transition, so characteristic of film. For a long time, church film work hasn't focused exclusively on religious issues and motifs. Instead, it is marked by a focus on films that articulate basic questions of human existence, moral conflicts and criticisms of injustice and oppression. Considering itself as an ally of committed cinema, the church enjoys the challenge of aesthetic creativity in the art of film.

The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen provides fertile ground for such commitment. As the festival celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, the churches can look back on 40 years of active participation in its history. In 1963 the first Catholic jury took part in the Short Film Festival, while the Protestant church was represented by observers. In 1964 INTERFILM, the international ecumenical film organization, established a Protestant jury. Since 2000 the Catholic jury and INTERFILM have been collaborating in one single ecumenical jury. An impressive list of award winners has accumulated over the years. A few examples will be screened during a special programme on the occasion of the anniversary. They reflect the diversity of the International Short Film Festival as a source of inspiration.

If there is anything that connects short films it is their diversity. The short form adapts to all contexts in which it has ever been exhibited. It reflects all genres that film history has ever produced. It can be documentary, drama, animation or experimental, a commodity or an autonomous work of art. The Short Film Festival has screened the entire spectrum and discussed it from all kinds of different angles. Short film draws on its ability to communicate in an open and varied way in order to surprise us again and again with its creative power.

The church juries have always chosen their award winners while bearing in mind their non-commercial, educational school and community programmes – they have furthermore recommended numerous films from the festival programme for distribution in this area of work. The media departments of the dioceses and the state churches have made those films available on a long-term basis. Whether the films represent political interventions, documents of repressed histories or marginalized cultures, portraits of underprivileged individuals or groups, and whether they are narrated using parable-like metaphors or question the order of things in a more experimental manner – in all these forms short films have not only caught the attention of the festival, but that of the churches, too. The churches' annual Ecumenical Reception is not only proof of their dedication to the festival but also to short film's social and cultural role. At one of those receptions Werner Schneider-Quindeau, at the timefilm commisioner of the EKD (Protestant Church of Germany), paid homage to short film as “experimental laboratory and communicative impetus", underlining its innovative power. The “charm of the beginning” has never been lost. For short film this is also true in jubilee years.