Special Mention

Philip Ullman

What Dying Feels Like, 09:03 min, Color, Stereo, Netherlands, 2021

Philip Ullman is a Swedish artist and filmmaker who graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. He questions the grounds of which value and sentience is prescribed, why one life is more valuable than another, and what it means to be human.

A mouse finds herself reciting childhood memories in a sterile living room. Shards of an alienating past paint the portrait of a human life. A sense of loss pervades the atmosphere as she’s torn between being human and being mouse, between being alive and being in a simulation.