'Limbo Citizen' project wins Young Creative Talent Award 2016

Camera Interactiva

The 'Limbo Citizen' project by Lillian Dam Bracia and Pien den Hollander is the winner of the Young Creative Talent Award 2016. The prize was awarded in the context of the Camera Interactiva talent development programme, in which teams of students from the academia and the arts have developed creative and interactive stories about citizenship.

'Limbo Citizen' is an interactive ‘walkthrough’ documentary that tells the story of four different migrants. An undocumented migrant from Ghana, an asylum-seeker from Syria, an economic migrant from Kenya and a student from India will bring you closer to the problems they encountered given their lack of an EU-member passport.

Despite coming from completely different backgrounds, there is one thing in common in all their stories: after leaving their homes, they end up in a Limbo. That is, a transition phase in which the present is unsettled and the coming future uncertain.

'Limbo Citizen' installation was presented during the Cultural Sunday on 1 May and is expected to be showcased during several festivals in the Netherlands and abroad.

Helping young talent excel  

Camera Interactiva is a talent development programme in which teams of students, each consisting of a student from the academia and a student from the arts, were asked to create interactive stories about citizenship. During a period of 6 months teams received training and coaching sessions from academics, film makers and activists. In December 2015 six teams piched their stories to the jury comprised of professionals from academia, film and NGO sector, and three of them were awarded seed money to further develop their projects.

During the premiere on 3 April 2016, the same jury awarded the Young Creative Talent Award to 'Limbo Citizen'. The Award is worth €1500, while the other two short-listed teams – ‘Paper Paradise’ by Floor de Bie and Eva van Roekel and ‘Reality 3.0’ by Omar Daou and Anna Ies Willems – received Premiere Prizes worth €500 each. ‘Limbo Citizen’ was also the favourite project of online voters, gaining almost 200 votes, and thus received an additional ‘Audience Favourite’ Award worth an extra €500.

The jury consisted of four distinguished members: Prof. Frank Kessler (director of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University), Marlou Rutten (head of the programming at the Dutch Film Festival), Hans Goedkoop (Municipality of Utrecht) and Giovani Campbell (advisor at the Fonds voor Cultuurparticipatie).

Broad network of partners

Camera Interactiva is initiated by the Centre for the Humanities (Utrecht University) and implemented together with partners from the University (Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the HumanitiesIOS Institutions for open societiesInstitute for Cultural Inquiry ICON) as well as non-academic partners in the city of Utrecht (Utrecht University of the Arts – HKUDutch Film Festival – NFF). The programme is co-authored and driven by the Centre for the Humanities’ Artist-in-Residence Janina Pigaht. This initiative is implemented with the support of K.F. Hein Fonds and project 'Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging'.

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Camera Interactiva