Vimeo, the video-hosting service, has opened submissions for their second Vimeo Festival and Awards, which "celebrates the most creative and original videos online and the individuals that make them". Vimeo will award grants of $5,000 to all of the category winners as well as awarding a grant of $25,000 for the Grand Prize winner. There are 13 different categories, each of them to be judged separately, including categories for experimental and lyrical films (click on the links for a description and criteria of each category). An independent jury will judge the entries, which will include the category winners from last edition as well as two industry experts per category. Submissions are open until next February 20, 2012.

You can read a small interview to Jeremy Boxer, director of the festival, in the DINCA blog.

Urban Research 2012: Open call for film and video works!
Online Entry Deadline January 1st, 2012

The program Urban Research, curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge 2012, reaches beyond the genre "city films". Contemporary artists are engaged in local politics, they are concerned with specific urban problems and developments, and they are directly interacting with the public with performances and public interventions. Due to rapid changes of urban environment, place is no more a reliable urban structure connected with consistency and collective memory. Place must be reinvented and newly defined over and over, and this does not only apply for spaces of temporary use. Public space in the sense of social interchange and interaction - as well as just a space free to use - is not a given opportunity any more, which can be taken for granted. International artists address these themes and issues with a variety of forms, experimental, documentary, abstract, and narrative; they intervene directly or they show there visions of public space, and a new urban landscape. For the festival presentation all screening media (besides 35mm projection) and art-related projects are welcome.

Urban Research 2012 will be first presented at Directors Lounge  9-19 February 2012. The program has also been presented internationally in screenings in London, Mannheim, Hannover, Poznan, Freiburg, Essen, Dordrecht, Senigallia, St. Petersburg and Berlin.

Studio 27: Utopia?
for the Big Muddy Film Festival 34
Deadline: January 16, 2012

Studio 27 is looking for short videos and films for our next program at the Big Muddy Film Festival 34 at Southern Illinois University. We are curating a special out-of-competition screening titled "Utopia?" For this program, we are seeking experimental films and videos (under 30 minutes) that critique or express a fundamental shift in the trajectory of contemporary utopian thought and practice. We are interested in work that explores how utopia, as a projection of what is possible in the future, can be an implicit critique of what is lacking in the present, an indication of how far we have to go to achieve an ideal society. As the notion of dystopia is integrally connected to utopia, we also welcome work that is dystopic in nature. How do the limitations and contradictions of the present drive us toward escape or change? Another timely concern is how utopia is not necessarily a physical or geographic space. Rather, it can be an internal space, a transformation of individual or social consciousness. How does the hope for radical social transformation haunt contemporary media art, and how does the utopian work of the historical avant-garde speak to present day aspirations?