Kosovan director Visar Morina’s Shame And Money won the €15,000 award for best international film in the CineMasters competition at the Munich International Film Festival (MIFF), which came to a close on July 5.
Morina’s third feature debuted at Sundance in January, where it won the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic award. The Yellow Affair handles international sales.
Chinese writer-director Jing Zou’s debut feature A Girl Unknown won the €10,000 prize of the CineVision competition for best international film by an emerging director. The film follows a young Chinese woman from the age of six through to her thirties from the 1980s to the 2000s, living in three different families.
Pyramide International handles world sales for the film, which premiered in Critics’ Week at Cannes, where it won the Gan Foundation award and the Fipresci prize.
Nicolas Graux and Minh Quý Trương’s poetic documentary Hair, Paper, Water… about traditions, vanishing cultures and the importance of family won the main prize in the CineRebels competition.
The film previously won the Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present section at last year’s Locarno Film Festival.
Trương had previously won the CineRebels Award at the 2024 edition of MIFF when he presented his feature film Viêt And Na/
The €3,000 CineKindl Award for the director of the best film in the festival’s CineKindl section went to Italian director Margherita Spampinato for her debut feature Sweetheart about family, friendship and powerful emotions during one summer on the island of Sicily. Fandango Sales has international rights, with Arsenal Filmverleih set to release the film in Germany.
Tom Schreiber’s tragicomedy Beautiful Souls, about dreams and botched second chances, won the Fipresci prize of the New German Cinema section, while the young jury award was presented to Argentinian-born Sol Iglesias SK for her debut feature The Swimmers, following a group of teenagers caught between the hottest summer ever in Buenos Aires and the collapse of the state.
The audience awards went to Helena Hufnagel’s Agnes & Amir for best German film and to Syrian filmmaker Almourad Aldeeb’s autobiographical documentary If Only The Year Had 364 Days for best international film.
The CineKindl audience award was won by Swiss-Chinese director Natascha Beller for Splish Splash Forever.
According to figures released by MIFF on its last day (Sunday), more than 95,000 visitors attended around 385 screenings and 140 events during the festival week, up some 5% from 2025’s figure of 91,000.
“We were really thrilled that the cinemas were so full and this also included the smaller ones throughout Munich,” said festival and co-artistic director Christoph Gröner. “Wherever we went, we found audiences who were curious to join us in seeing new films and making our mission to be a festival of discoveries a reality.”
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