Filmfest Hamburg


FILMFEST HAMBURG is an international film festival, the third-largest of its kind in Germany. It shows national and international feature and documentary films in eleven sections. The range of the program stretches from art house films to innovative mainstream cinema, presenting the first feature films of young unknown directors together with films by internationally established directors. In 2017 more than 40,000 people attended 250 screenings of 141 films.
Albert Wiederspiel has been the director of the festival since 2003.

History

FILMFEST HAMBURG had various predecessors dating from the 1950s through to the 1980s. It was founded in late 1991 and first held in 1992. Academy Award winners and nominees such as Clint Eastwood, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz, Atom Egoyan, Julian Schnabel and Tilda Swinton, Dogma-founder Lars von Trier, award-winning director Kim Ki-duk and German directors such as Wim Wenders, Fatih Akin, Andreas Dresen and Tom Tykwer attended the festival in the past.

Festival program

The program of FILMFEST HAMBURG is composed of the following permanent sections:

Douglas Sirk Award

This award is presented annually since 1995 to a personality who has made outstanding achievements within film culture and film industry. It receives its name from director Douglas Sirk, born in Hamburg as Detlef Sierck.
The Hamburg Producers Award for German Cinema Productions has been awarded in the new section Große Freiheit - Filme aus Deutschland since 2018. The producer of the winning film will receive 25,000 euros. The prize money will be provided by the Ministry of Culture and Media.
The Hamburg Producers Award for European Cinema Co-Productions will be awarded to the films in the section Freihafen which will feature German-European co-productions
This award for German TV productions is endowed with 25.000 € provided by VFF, Verwertungsgesellschaft der Film- und Fernsehproduzenten mbH.
The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung is awarding this prize at FILMFEST HAMBURG for the first time in 2013. Films aspiring to provide a political message are competing for the prize money of 5,000 euros.
The Art Cinema Award was established by the Conféderation Internationale des Cinémas d'Art et d'Essai. Films that have a German distributor can be nominated. Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein is contributing 5,000 € to the award in support of PR measures by the German distributor.
In 2012 the NDR sponsored the NDR Young Talent Award with a prize money of 5,000 €.
The audience gets to decide by public vote which of the competing films in the Eurovisuell section is their favorite and receives a prize money of €5,000, donated by the Commerzbank.
The Hamburgische Kulturstiftung and the Rolner Stiftung fund this award since 2013 with prize money of 5,000 €. A jury made up of children selects the children's and youth films for this international competition.
Since 2017, the German Foreign Office honors directors who create films across national and cultural borders with a prize money of 10,000 €.

Montblanc Script Award

Endowed with 10.000 € sponsored by Hamburg-based company Montblanc. The award is granted as part of the "Northern Lights" section to a fiction or documentary film either produced or set in Hamburg or Schleswig-Holstein.