Laïla Marrakchi’s third feature film Strawberries was among the winners at FilmFest Hamburg’s closing ceremony on Saturday (October 3), as the festival celebrated record-breaking attendence numbers.
The Cannes Un Certain Regard premiere won the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s €10,000 prize for socially committed cinema, and tells the story of a group of Moroccan women who travel to Andalusia for seasonal strawberry-picking work but encounter harsh working conditions. It has been selected as Morocco’s Oscar entry and will be released in Germany at the end of January 2027 by Immer gute Filme.
Local broadcaster NDR’s €5,000 Young Talent Award for debut features went to Argentinian co-directors Ezequiel Salinas and Ramiro Sonzini for The Night is Fading Away, while the Critics Award was won by the historical drama Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors by the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz whose work had been the subject of the FilmFest’s Filmmaker in Focus showcase in 2019.
The €5,000 Audience Award went to the tragicomedy Just An Illusion by the French directing duo Éric Toledano und Olivier Nakache.
Record attendences
Malika Rabahallah’s third outing as festival director saw admissions climb by 5% to around 65,000 from last year’s previous record-breaking total of 62,000.
This 10-day festival wrapped with the German premiere of Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!.
The FilmFest’s 34th edition played host to 653 guests from 32 countries. Among them were Dame Helen Mirren, this year’s recipient of the Douglas Sirk Award in recognition of her contribution to film culture and the film industry as well as directors Lukas Dhont, Martin McDonagh, Abinash Bikram Shah, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Audrius Blazevicius, Fatih Akin, Wim Wenders, Anton Corbijn, Rachel Rose, actors Esther Ofarim, Mina Rahimzadeh, Saskia Rosendahl, and Barbie’s production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer.
Strong industry presence
Meanwhile, the international film community of producers, distrubutors, sales agents and festival programmers was out in full force at the FilmFest Hamburg Industry Days which served for the second year running as the venue of the European Work in Progress (EWIP) platform and International Film Distribution Summit (IFDS) alongside the existing Explorer Konferenz and Made in Germany programmes.
True to Rabahallah’s mission to make the FilmFest “a meeting place for the film industry where ideas take shape and networks grow,” the Industry Days opened its doors to additional initiatives wanting to benefit from the presence of international players attending the festival.
European Film Promotion organised Europe! Connect for local producers such as Heimathafen Film & Media’s Sebastian Weyland and Marlene Film’s Sandra Müller to meet with representatives of sales agents - ranging from Intramovies and New Europe Film Sales to The Playmaker and Trust Nordisk - to discuss new projects currently at an early stage of development and financing.
In addition, a new collaboration between the FilmFest, IFDS, and Cannes’s Marchè du Film enabled alumni of its Cannes Makers training programme for emerging talents to come to Hamburg to gain first hand knowledge of the challenges facing the internatonal film industry. These included Italy’s Stefano Ongaro, currently a film marketing assistant at Alphapanda in Berlin, and Belarussian Maya Cherchen, who is working in acquisitions at Berlin-based Plaion Pictures.
And the Futura Cinema initiative dedicated to innovation in the film industry held the fifth stage of its incubation programme at locations across Hamburg for its participants to present projects exploring new forms of film exploitation and audience development to a selection of professionals in the cultural sector.
The 35th edition FilmFest Hamburg will run from 30 September to 9 October, 2027.
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