Diagonale Prizes
Production Design and Costume Design ’24

for Best Production Design from the Austrian Filmdesigners Association VÖF

Martin Reiter
Mit einem Tiger schlafen

Jury statement: The colour white plays a leading role in this film about women artists, whose most important settings are studios and exhibition spaces as well as the unpainted canvas. Martin Reiter’s production design works with white in various shades and gradations – cream white, eggshell white, titanium white – and thus creates excitingly nuanced spaces. Props in Lassnig’s typical colours are carefully placed in these spaces: a chair in lime green, a telephone in turquoise. Reiter’s set design thus places film and painting in relation to each other and finds a genuinely cinematic translation for Maria Lassnig’s painting. With his stylised and non-naturalistic set design, Reiter subverts the usual conventions of the biopic and contributes significantly to the fact that Sleeping with a Tiger finds its very own approach to an artist’s biography in the field of tension between historical fidelity and liberation from it.

for Best Costume Design from the Austrian Filmdesigners Association VÖF

Tanja Hausner
Club Zero

Jury statement: Illness of feelings, illness of colours: The school uniforms of the elite boarding school glow poisonous green and purple, an unpleasantly dissonant colour combination that almost hurts the eyes. These uniforms vividly illustrate how Club Zero uses costumes rather than character psychology to tell the story of tensions and conflicts. Tanja Hausner’s costume design achieves this masterfully. Colours, cuts, fabrics and patterns characterise and typify individual figures, couples and groups in the large ensemble cast of Club Zerot and juxtapose them in a tense confrontation: the opulent glamour of some against the stiff and uniform asceticism of others.

Jury Feature Film:
Ortrun Bauer (cinematographer, editor, AT)
Elena Meilicke (film critic, DE)
Silvan Zürcher (Director, CH)