Announcing the Golden Calf Digital Culture 2025 nominations

30 September 2025

The three nominations have been announced for the Golden Calf for Best Digital Culture Production, during the NFF Focustalk: Presenting the Fellows and Nominees. The award will be presented at the EY Golden Calf Gala on Friday 3 October. The three nominees are part of Storyspace, the Netherlands Film Festival's exhibition at Bibliotheek Neude filled with VR, immersive installations and performances. The nominated productions can be experienced in the Neude Library in Utrecht until 2 October.

Nominations for Best Digital Cultural Production 2025 (in alphabetical order)

Ancestors – Steye Hallema (production: The Smartphone Orchestra)

Lacuna - Maartje Wegdam en Nienke Huitenga Broeren (productipn: Podium Biarritz, Copper Views Film Productions and Studio Biarritz)

waiting for cows - affect lab (production: K.O. Productions)

See the nominees

Ancestors

Lacuna

waiting for cows

Jury Report Best Digital Cultural Production 2025

The Golden Calf Competition Best Digital Culture presents a wide spectrum of forms this year. The selection consists of a variety of installations, experiences, AR and VR productions. The jury – made up out of Cecilie Levy, Jeroen Cluckers and Joris Weijdom – is impressed by this diversity, in which the richness of the Digital Culture field is powerfully captured.

The productions are socially engaged and touch on important themes. Each one offers room for reflection and invites the visitor to think and speculate about themselves and their relationship to the world. Beautiful connections can also be found between the works, such as looking forwards and backwards in time, human and non-human relationships, and the profound influence of digital technologies such as AI, XR, big data, the smartphone, and social media on our daily lives.

In all digital cultural productions of this edition of Storyspace, the time, energy, and dedication invested by the makers is evident. The jury explicitly values the depth of research underlying the works, with the pieces shown serving both as outcomes of artistic research and as interim results of ongoing inquiry. The jury recognizes the social relevance of how makers can contribute to depolarizing public debate in these turbulent times. At the same time, this raises a critical question: how long can makers sustain this within the current political, financial, and cultural landscape?

After careful deliberation, the jury has nominated the following three productions: Ancestors by Steye Hallema, Lacuna by Maartje Wegdam and Nienke Huitenga Broeren, and waiting for cows by affect lab.

: Ancestors is an interactive group experience in which the smartphone serves as a guide. Based on participants’ selfies, AI creates a shared family tree, projecting them six generations into the future.
Ancestors succeeds in creating emotionally charged interaction within a well-rounded story, using intelligence, humor, and empathy. By subtly stimulating participants’ inner worlds and leaving space for their own experience, a shared encounter emerges that leads to new insights.
The maker addresses a universal theme that touches the core of what it means to be human: “In what world do you want your children to grow up?” Without becoming heavy-handed or sentimental, it opens a fundamental conversation about the future, interwoven with personal memories of the past, making tangible that every decision we make now truly matters.
Especially in a time of polarization, this work offers a valuable platform to meet one another. It is powerful that the smartphone – the very technology in which so many people lose themselves – is used here to create live connections with others.
The jury was impressed by the care and clarity of the artistic and technical execution, which appears deceptively simple but in fact enables a highly complex social interaction. The use of one’s own phone and the precise, effective instructions displayed allow participants to fully trust the system. The work strikes a delicate balance between providing direction and allowing space. The result is an almost holistic experience where many individual paths are followed, yet lead to a collectively shared understanding.

: Lacuna is a room-scale VR documentary that immerses you in the gripping story of Sonja. As a young child, she was permanently separated from her parents in 1943. Sonja survived the war but cannot remember anything about it. This documentary guides us through her life via distorted memories, fading images, and reinterpretations of the past.
Lacuna stands out through its strong artistic realization. It distinguishes itself through its layered nature, both in content and in visual language. The immersive experience unfolds as Sonja’s thought-space, where she attempts to retrieve memories. The power of virtual reality is fully utilized here as an inner world in which one can freely move while memories appear and disappear in rhythm with the narration. The makers deliberately choose to render the memories, manifesting as photos and 3D spaces, fluid, uncontrollable, and intangible for the viewer. This makes Sonja’s searching in the in-between spaces of memory physically perceptible in a remarkable way.
The jury was moved by the compelling way the story is visualized. In particular, there was appreciation for the translation of the “in-between” of memories, a complex and challenging concept here shaped with great care and imagination. A key strength lies in the parallels the work draws with the present and the current political climate, and the question of how long one continues to hope that things aren’t really so bad. But also, in the simple question of whether you have ever asked your own mother about having a child, the work underscores its power rooted in human scale and tragedy.

: waiting for cows offers an intimate portrait of three cows: Robina 117, Aergetina 4, and Margo 104. Through a real-time biometric data stream, the installation immerses us in their lives and the industry they are part of. The cows’ behavior determines the rhythm and imagery of the video shown to the audience. The complex relationship between humans, animals, and technology takes center stage across different elements of the installation, which are then contextualized with infographics and a documentary.
The jury values waiting for cows as a powerful and relevant project that creates space for reflection and dialogue by making the rumination of the cows the leading rhythm of the experience, in a time when public opinion is often marked by speed, prejudice, and polarization. The work invites viewers to take time in forming their own opinions, without imposing them. In this way, the work functions as a “harbor of stillness” in a noisy era, contributing to a nuanced debate on city and countryside. The juxtaposition between living animals and clinical data, combined with the careful, affectionate camerawork, gives the work a poetic quality.
The work, six years in the making, demonstrates impressive dedication and care. The jury appreciates the authenticity of the craftsmanship and the genuine intent to bring people together. This also highlights the project’s potential to serve as a vehicle for dialogue between city and countryside in the future.

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