Category Short form 2022

1. Croatia/Croatian Radio and television - Croatian Radio
LIDDY

Original title: Liddy

Author: Milan Begović

Producer: Katja Šimunić

Director: Petar Vujačić

Sound Engineer: Srđan Nogić

Other key staff: Adriana Kramarić (music editor)

Actors: Siniša Popović, Frano Mašković and Petra Svrtan

Original language: Croatian

Length: 7'20''

Milan Begović (1876, Vrlika - 1948, Zagreb) is a Croatian modernist playwright and novelist, but also a poet, whom we present in this short audiodrama with one of his most famous poetic works of his young age, the love poem Liddy from the cycle Les Passagères (1911). The intertextual dialogue with literary loves (mentioning Goethe's Mignon, for example) and the cosmopolitan and nomadic worldview intertwine with the sensuality of physical touch and corporeal love.

2. Croatia/Croatian Radio and television - Croatian Radio
LITTLE DANCER AGED FOURTEEN

Original title: “Mala četrnaestogodišnja plesačica”

Author/Producer/Director: Katja Šimunić

Sound Engineer: Tomislav Šamec

Other key staff: Franka Meštrović (music editor)

Original language: Croatian

Length: 9' 25''

At the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition held in Paris in 1881, Edgar Degas presented the only sculpture that he would ever exhibit in public: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (La petite danseuse de quatorze ans). A young ballet dancer named Marie van Goethem posed for what would be a wax figure dressed in a bodice, tutu and ballet slippers, with a satin ribbon in her real hair wig.

Considered at the time as a highly controversial work, the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is today praised as a groundbreaking work of art, well known through the 28 bronze casts produced from this unique original wax statuette, following the artist's death. The figure of Marie van Goethem exhibited in museums and galleries around the world has become one of the most beloved sculptures, but we have known little of the real girl born in Paris in 1865 who was briefly a member of the Ballet of Paris Opera and worked for two years as a model for some of Degas' works, notably for the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.

3. Czech Republic/Czech Radio
WORLD NUMBER 33

Original title: Svět číslo 33

Author: Petr Hudský

Producer: Kateřina Rathouská

Director: Ondřej David

Sound Engineers: Dominik Budil, Ondřej Gášek

Original language: Czech

Length: 8'06''

World Number 33 was first published as a podcast on the Czech Radio portal mujRozhlas.cz as a Christmas present for listeners in December, 2020. This short sci-fi podcast explores the story of the star of Bethlehem, the three kings and the birth of Jesus - as it might have happened. In this version, ‘Captain’ and ‘Lieutenant’ are supernatural beings who travel around the universe on various missions… including one to Earth. A relatively routine operation for ‘Captain’ and ‘Lieutenant’ emerges a crucial event in the life of Earthlings.

4. Georgia/Georgian Public Broadcasting
DO WE NEED SHAKESPEARE OR NOT?

Original title: Gvchirdeba Tu Ara Shekspiri

Author/Producer/Director: Zurab Kandelaki (Based on Sonnet 66 by William Shakespeare)

Sound Engineer: Bako Khvichia

Original language: Georgian

Length: 7'

Unfortunately, the question of this mini radio play - do we need Shakespeare or not, is still relevant today. We invited prominent Georgian theater and cinema actor Tengiz Archvadze at his 89, to read the sonnet. His interpretation of the text helped the realization of our idea.

5. Germany/Phoebe Mcindoe, Marta Medvešek
THE AWAKENING

Original title: The Awakening

Author: Inspired by Kate Chopin’s 1899 The Awakening

Producers/Directors/Sound Engineers: Phoebe McIndoe & Marta Medvešek

Original language: English

Length: 9'58''

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.”

So concludes Kate Chopin’s pivotal novel…The Awakening.

Written in the late 1800s, the book follows the journey of Edna Pontellier, a woman who finds herself on the brink of self-actualisation. Edna - married, and a mother - is beginning to feel, for the first time, the tug of an illicit identity that has long lain dormant under her skin. Kept at bay by the social requirements of being a woman - a wife - a mother - only now is she beginning to realize new self that is slowly taking form… A self that desires, a self that longs for solitude, a self that is shaped by music that drifts from the piano and the awakened lust Edna experiences on this magical moon soaked evening.

6. Iran/IRIB
THE LAST TAT MAN

Original title: Akherin marde tat

Author: Behruz Jafari

Producer/Sound Engineer: Nahid Saadati

Other key staff: Afsane Kazemi

Original language: Farsi

Length: 10'

This short document is about a man who live in Glin Gaya village in Marand of Azerbayjan in Iran. He is the only one who speaks in an ancient language.

7. Iran/Radio Yazd
GOOD MOOD

Original title: بوخ لاح

Author: Taghizadeh Maryam

Producers: Taghizadeh Maryam & Shafie Hossein

Sound Engineer: Shafie Hossein

Original language: Persian

Length: 10'

Yazd is an old city in the center of Iran. This program is about the very old customs and traditions of the ancient Nowruz holiday in Yazd. Rituals such as breaking jars, cooking local food, making vows, sprinkling water on people, jumping over fires, etc. Neighbors gathered to perform the ceremony, reciting old poems and performing the ceremony with joy.

8. Ireland/Bernard Clarke
YOUR NAME HERE

Original title: Your Name Here

Author: Emily Dickinson

Producer/Director/Sound Engineer: Bernard Clarke

Other key staff: Liz Nolan, Arthur Crawford

Original language: English

Length: 10'

This is an adaptation of Emily Dickinson’s poem known as “I died for Beauty…” It is set in a technology shop, inside a rebooted but failing and dying computer. Your Name Here has a short prelude and then tracks Dickinson’s three verses.

The Prelude has the computer booting up, running through its memory, recalling other poems from John Milton, Stevie Smith, Guillaume Apollinaire and more from Emily Dickinson (Because I Could Not Stop For Death; I Felt A Funeral In My Brain; I like a look of Agony).

The first verse features the voice trying to remember itself (the poem), the scenario (laid in a tomb and then quickly joined by another martyr it seems), and how it computes – the signal comes and goes.

The signal goes and that leads us into the second verse where the young man gives our computer person a plug in (like A CD Rom) for the computer’s drive. The young man assures him that it will work, but it will totally scramble anything like iTunes (or Windows Media Player). This is exactly what happens as the computer plays first Robert Plant and then Ella Fitzgerald, but also finds itself “singing” Abe Lyman’s “I Cried For You” with the words from the poem (For Beauty, I replied) and Miles Davis’s “Freddie Freeloader” (For Truth, For Truth For Truth) -sings the computer.

The last verse sees the computer eating itself alive -turning on its own internal drive and fan, but determined to go on and tell its tale, like some Beckett character. Until it finally collapses and fades out on a string of “names, names, names…”

9. Switzerland/SRF - Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen
VICIOUS DISHES – DELECTABLE RUMOURS AND THE NAKED TRUTH ABOUT YOUR FAVOURITE FOOD
Epizode 1: Lucrezia Borgia's Belly Button - Tortellini

Original title: Küchengeflüster

Author/Director: Karin Berri

Producer: Anina Barandun

Sound Engineer: Roland Fatzer

Other key staff: Mona Petri

Original language: German

Length: 5'

There is nothing more beautiful than to have given your name to a good dish.
Jean Cocteau

Some dishes refuse to disappear from the menus for centuries. These dishes resist every neurotic chef’s whim. As "classics", they undergo a culinary apotheosis and become immortal.

Take the great singer Nellie Melba, for example – she still lives on in her peaches. And who knows anything about Count Stroganoff beyond the fact that a delicious beef dish is named after him?

There are stories behind all those culinary classics: What is the connection between Lucrezia Borgia’s navel and tortellini? Or how did the Caesar Salad manage to become the only Italian immigrant from Mexico ever to make it onto the menu of the White House? Questions upon questions, waiting to be answered!

Vicious Dishes! is the first culinary docu-fictional podcast by Swiss Radio SRF, and it will bring tears to your eyes without even cutting onions. Seven episodes tell the stories of classics on the menu. No window-dressing. No quarter. Sustainable. Contains no palm oil. Prepared for you, with lots of passion and lots of love. Enjoy! Or as Julia Child would put it: "Bon Appétit!".

10. United Kingdom/Falling Tree Productions
THANKS FOR YOUR LETTER

Original title: Thanks For Your Letter

Author: Joe Dunthorne

Producer/Director: Eleanor McDowall

Sound Engineer: Mike Woolley

Other key staff: Axel Kacoutié (Exec Producer)

Original language. English

Length: 7'47''

The writer Joe Dunthorne reflects on Desiderius Erasmus’s motivation for finding 195 ways to thanks someone for their letter.

11. United Kingdom/Almost Tangible
TWO BAD MICE

Original title: Two Bad Mice

Authors: Almost Tangible & Beatrix Potter

Producer: Charlotte Melén

Director: Eilidh Loan

Sound Engineer: Johnny Edwards

Other key staff: Sheena Bhattessa (Narrator), Eilidh Loan (Mice), Mackensie Sutherland (Little Girl), Niamh Shepheard (Nurse), Carl Prekopp (Carol Singer)

Original language: English

Length: 9'

When Tom Thumb and his wife Hunca Munca (who just happen to be a pair of mice) go exploring in an empty doll's house, they find a dinner table full of delicious food. Imagine their disappointment when it turns out the food is made of plaster!

Almost Tangible presents Beatrix Potter’s classic tale, brought to vivid life in an all-new immersive adaptation. Fusing stunning narration with dramatisation and binaural sound design, this story places the listener directly in the action alongside these beloved animals and their plucky antics!

Two Bad Mice was recorded and produced entirely remotely in Covid-19 lockdown. Sound designer Johnny Edwards has merged the warmth of Sheena Bhattessa’s playful narration with bold, quirky characterisations of this pair of mice who get up to no good in a little girl’s nursery. The mice themselves, voiced by director Eilidh Loan, are splendidly silly and their liveliness brings this decades-old story a fresh perspective. Just 9 minutes long, this story is sure to bring out a giggle in listeners of all ages.