Helge Albers

Source: Jasper Ehrich Fotografie

Helge Albers

Helge Albers, CEO of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein’s regional film fund MOIN, has been on a roll this year ever since the City of Hamburg announced it would be increasing the fund’s annual budget by €5m to €22m for 2025 and 2026.

“The increased budget enables us to act more flexibly and make things possible at both the funding and structural levels,” he explains. “MOIN can provide greater levels of support to films at various stages, which is something that is urgently needed given the rising costs in film production.”

One of the first beneficiaries of this cash injection was Hamburg’s annual ‘cinema awards’, which recognise quality programming, with a funding increase from €100,000 to €200,000. This has allowed MOIN to introduce the ‘cinema bonus’ award of up to €10,000 for exhibitors depending on such criteria as the number of MOIN-funded films they screened and the total number of admissions the films received.

Hamburg’s renowned ABATON-Kino was one of the first beneficiaries, receiving a cinema award with a cash prize of €11,000 as well as a cinema bonus of a further €8,000.

The MOIN cinema bonus, says Albers, “acknowledges the essential value of cinemas because, without them, there wouldn’t be any feature films”.

Indie champion

MOIN’s commitment to independent cinema hasn’t stopped there. The fund also raised the award for the CICAE arthouse cinema award from €5,000 to €25,000 to support the PR campaign for a film’s German theatrical release. The Secret Agent, The Little Sister and Phantoms Of July are among nine titles at Filmfest Hamburg in the running to receive this support. 

Meanwhile, the Filmfest will see the launch of script co-development programme Nordic NEST, another initiative made possible thanks to MOIN’s budget boost and organised in collaboration with the five Nordic film institutes and the German Federal Film Board. Thirty producers from the five Nordic countries are coming to Hamburg to meet their German counterparts for networking events.

Albers, whose contract as CEO was extended to 2029 at the beginning of this year, is not short of new ideas about how to develop Hamburg and the surrounding region into a go-to hub for national and international film production. When the festival ends. MOIN is teaming with Denmark’s Publikum.io, which is opening an office in Hamburg this year to serve the German market, to create a pilot incentive in the area of audience development, with the results presented at the Filmfest next year.

MOIN has also been able to actively support Filmfest director Malika Rabahallah’s goal to expand the festival’s industry dimension which has seen the European Work in Progress market and the International Film Distribution Summit relocate to Hamburg this year.

That industry focus has seen MOIN collaborate with Industry Days’ head Fabian Massah on putting together a series of panels aimed at the homegrown German film and TV industry under the “Made in Germany” banner.

Albers is keen to expand the fund’s ecological credentials. “We are joining with the German Film Academy in presenting the interim results of research about ecological sustainability [which has been] supported by MOIN with Planet Narratives [a non-profit initiative empowering filmmakers to use their stories for the planet’s future],” he explains. “In addition, we are partners with the Green Actors Lounge on discussions about green storytelling.”

MOIN is also a co-sponsor of the long-established All You Need Is Law panel which will be addressing the potential issue of accessing private equity funding for films in Germany, while Albers will be one of the speakers at the Explorer Konferenz’s overview of recent changes to the public film financing landscape and future prospects for international co-productions with Germany.

Aside from the industry programme, accredited guests and the general public alike will have an opportunity to get a taste of the diversity of films backed by MOIN in the various sections of this year’s Filmfest’s programme. 

They include the German premieres of local hero Fatih Akin’s historical drama Amrum, Carla Simón’s Romeriá, Tarzan and Arab Nasser’s award-winning Once Upon A Time In Gaza, Steffen Goldkamp’s Rain Fell On The Nothing New, Roseanne Pel’s Donkey Days and Nastia Korkia’s Short Summer.

Among the MOIN-backed world premieres are Hille Norden’s Smalltown Girl, Milan Skrobanek’s Als Wäre Es Leicht and Reza Memari’s The Last Whale Singer.

Topics