Mariko Minoguchi’s The Other Side, starring Nina Hoss, and Leonie Krippendorf’s Children Of The Sun are among five world premieres selected for FilmFest Hamburg’s Große Freiheit sidebar of contemporary German cinema.
The Other Side stars Hoss as a doctor who is ostracised by society following a contagious illness and retreats into the solitude of the mountains. An encounter with a young woman breaks through her isolation and leads them both on a perilous journey across the Alps.
The co-production by Munich-based Trimafilm with Rundfilm will be released in German cinemas by X-Verleih on October 22, with international sales handled by Beta Cinema.
Children Of The Sun sees Krippendorf reunited with actresses Jella Haase and Lena Urzendowsky, the stars of her award-winning 2020 debut Cocoon.
The film is a co-production between Germany’s Kineo Film and Greece’s Studiobauhausfilm and centres on four people who establish a radical community on a remote mountain in Greece, free from material possessions, digital connections and monogamy.
Furthermore, actor-director Aron Lehmann’s Lies About My Mother is also a world premiere in the section. It is based on Daniela Dröscher’s eponymous bestseller focusing on a family in provincial West Germany in the 1980s as seen through the eyes of their daughter.
The film, whose screenplay was written by the film’s lead actress (and Lehmann’s wife Rosalie Thomass, marks the director’s latest collaboration with distributor-producer Tobis after his previous feature films Jagdsaison and Das Schönste Mädchen der Welt.
Also making its world premiere is Tilman König’s Leipzig-set tragicomedy Der große Zusammenbruch, starring Thorsten Merten and Hanna Schygulla. It follows a bon vivant, his daughter and a dubious conspiracy theorists’ conference where the looming spectre of the end of the world offers father and daughter a fragile chance at a new beginning.
The fifth world premiere is documentary filmmaker Jens Meurer’s Biermann, a portrait of singer-songwriter, political essayist and poet Wolf Biermann, once one of East Germany’s most renowned dissidents. Now aged 89, he was born under National Socialism to Jewish Communist parents, and has borne witness to Germany’s changing identity over the last century.
The co-production between Meurer’s Instant Film with Zeitsprung Pictures and Clouds Hill Studio will be released in Germany by Majestic Filmverleih on October 29.
The Große Freiheit showcase of emerging talents and established filmmakers will also serve as the platform for another seven German films that have had their world premieres at international film festivals in recent months.
Two films will have first premiered at Venice: Wim Wenders’ 3D documentary From Inside Out– The Architecture Of Peter Zumthor, on the the work and philosophy of the renowned Swiss architect, and Ukrainian director Mykyta Gibalenko’s Giornate degli Autori title Camouflage.
Fatih Akin’s drama Ghost Song is the opening film of this year’s San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain, while Frauke Finsterwalder’s adaptation of her husband Christian Kracht’s bestselling novel Eurotrash will world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival before heading to Hamburg.
In addition, Große Freiheit is screening Ann Oren’s second feature Objet, which had its world premiere at Locarno last month, and two films that were presented during last year’s European Work in Progress during Hamburg’s Industry Days 2025: Katharina Rivilis’ Un Certain Regard title, the coming-of-age drama I’ll Be Gone In June, and Alisa Kolosova’s feature film debut I Spy With My Little Eye, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June.
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