Filmfest Hamburg came to a close on October 7 with an awards ceremony that saw the CICAE’s arthouse cinema award presented to UK filmmaker Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut How To Have Sex which premiered in Un Certain Regard in Cannes in May
The cash prize €5,000 is provided by Hamburg’s local film fund MOIN to be spent on the film’s PR campaign by its German distributor capelight pictures which will release the film in German cinemas on December 7.
The €5,000 NDR young talent award, sponsored by local public broadcaster NDR, went to Noora Niasari’s debut feature Shayda the audience award winner in this year’s Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic competition.
For the second year running, the film critics’ prize went to a film by a Romanian filmmaker - Radu Jude for Do Not Expect Too Much Of The End of The World – following Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. in 2022. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s prize for socially- engaged cinema went to Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela’s documentary In The Rearview which had screened in Filmfest’s Veto! sidebar.
Sven Halfar’s documentary Heaven Can Wait - Wir Leben Jetzt won the Filmfest Hamburg audience award, sponsored by the Hapag Lloyd Foundation for the second time this year. The film will be released by mindjazz pictures in German cinemas on October 12.
Packed cinemas
Filmfest Hamburg closed with the German premiere of Mika Gustafson’s Paradise Is Burning and the news this year’s edition was the best ever attended in the festival’s 31-year history.
The 10 days of the Filmfest and the preceding open-air Binnenalster Filmfest (September 14-17) saw 52,700 tickets being sold, up 17% on last year’s total.
“I am overwhelmed by the enthusiasm shown for cinema by our Hamburg audience,” said festival director Albert Wiederspiel of his final edition. “How wonderful it is to have full cinemas and to experience stories together on the big screen.”
“Filmmakers like coming to Hamburg because we have the best Q&As around and the audiences are so interested in talking with the directors at length about their films. Conversations often continue afterwards at the bar.”
This year, the Filmfest was host to more than 500 guests from 33 countries, including directors such as Bertrand Bonello, Radu Jude, Catherine Breillart, Timm Kröger, Wim Wenders, Nikolaj Arcel, Isabel Herguera, Monia Chokri, and Dán Panek as well as actors Sandra Hüller, Mads Mikkelsen, Lena Urzendowsky, Susanne Wolff , Voodoo Jürgens, Eli Skorcheva and Jan Bülow.
Producer awards
German film and television producers were in the spotlight on the Filmfest’s penultimate day (October 6) when the Hamburg Producers Awards were announced in the historic House of the Patriotic Society located in the heart of the city’s old town..
The €25,000 Hamburg Producers Award for International Cinema Co-Productions, sponsored by Hamburg’s Ministry of Culture and Media, was presented to producer Fabian Driehorst of the Hamburg-based animation studio Fabian&Fred for Isabel Herguera’s Sultana’s Dream premiered in competition at San Sebastián before coming to the Filmfest.
And the Hamburg Producers Award for German Cinema Productions - also with a cash prize of € 25,000 - went to director-producer Katharina Huber of Cologne-based Acker Film for her fiction feature debut A Good Place which won two prizes when it premiered in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present sidebar this August.
Two awards were presented to German TV productions screening in the Filmfest’s Televisionen sidebar with cash prizes sponsored by the collection society VFF.
The €25,000 prize for the best TV film went to Claussen + Putz for Sörensen Catches Fire, actor Bjarne Mädel’s second work as a director after his debut Sörensen hat Angst which had screened at the Filmfest’s 2020 edition.
Meanwhile, Katrin Haase and Oliver Arnold of U5 Filmproduktion took home the € 10,000 Special Prize for Serial Formats for their production of the ZDF mini-series Füxe about life in a German student fraternity.
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