| Diagonale Award Short Documentary 2026 |

| FOR BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY FILM BY KULTUM. |

Sophie Bösker
Motherigine

Jury Statement:
The film is disarming, though not entirely peaceable: “Roses are red, violets are blue, I want to smash the patriarchy with you,” reads a postcard on the wall. In Motherigine, Sophie Bösker takes us on a journey of insight that makes one thing clear: this is not something that can be accomplished as an individual undertaking.

Over the course of three years, beginning with pregnancy, Bösker observes — in a radically subjective manner — herself, her daughter, and also her partner, who, despite intentions of a fifty-fifty arrangement, is suspiciously often absent. Bösker’s true accomplice, witness, and confessor all at once is a very particular instance: the camera she turns on herself, in moments of overwhelm, self-reproach, and everyday situations that are often quite funny. It is a film that draws its power from its direct and humorous gaze at the deep-rooted patriarchal mechanisms underlying the first years of motherhood. Bösker resists them convincingly, using the means of the artist she is: she raps — angry, precise, straight to the point — in the face of patriarchy, and of us as well.

Jury Short Documentary:
Ekkehard Knörer (Film Critic & Cultural Scholar, DE)
Nina Kusturica (Director & Producer, AT)
Lisa Polster (Director, AT)