Festival Portrait:
"With A Rubber Dinghy In The Atlantic" - Filmfest München
|
Name
Filmfest München Address Münchener Filmwochen GmbH Kaiserstr. 39 D-80801 München phone +49-89-3 81 90 40 fax +49-89-38 19 04 26 Director Eberhard Hauff The festival was founded in 1983. It takes place during eight days at the end of June/beginning of July. Structure/sections: No international competition. Nine sections ranging from "Major Premieres" and "Independents" to "Top Television" and "Children's Film Fest" and one or two retrospectives. Approx. 250 films shown in all. Conditions of participation: Films having been shown publicly in Germany (cinema, TV, festivals) are not accepted. Few exceptions. Awards: The festival has no international competition but, within the framework of the festival, five awards are attributed, among them, the HYPO-BANK Young Director's Support Prize for the best German Film (DM 60,000), the "TV Movie Award" (DM 100,000) for the best international and the best German TV film presented at the festival and the High Hopes Award (DM 50,000). General audience: 86,000 tickets sold. Special features: Recognized by FIAPF as non-competitive festival. Attendance of business representatives: Most of the German distributors and buyers of the German TV stations attend the festival. 1,500 accredited participants of the film industry. In the future, the festival intends to intensify the PR work for films without German distributor. Media coverage: approx. 450 accredited journalists from all over Germany. Strong coverage in Bavarian media; summaries in all major German papers and some TV stations. |
"I had never intended to run the festival" recalls Eberhard Hauff, director of the Filmfest München since its launch in 1983.
"The idea for a festival had come from Schlöndorff and me to stage an event alongside Berlin which would cater more for the interests of the German cinema as a promotional platform", Hauff continues. A festival concept was hammered out with the Munich city authorities, but the festival didn't come any nearer to being realised. Then a controversial turn of events in 1979 led the directors to charter a train from Munich to Hamburg where they held their "Festival of the Filmmakers".
Three years later, in November 1982, the city announced that it planned to stop the financing for a festival, leading Hauff to throw his hat into the ring and declare himself prepared to organise a festival: "I put the festival together in just 12 weeks and took the dates - at the end of June - that the Berlinale had previously had. When I said 'end of June', the people at city hall thought I meant a year later in June 1984. They were horrified because they thought it would be a terrible belly landing".
"On the first day of the festival, the film critic Ponkie wrote in Munich's Abendzeitung that 'Eberhard Hauff has set off on the Atlantic in a rubber dinghy' and, that evening, the Mayor said in the Gloria cinema: 'Ladies and gentlemen, the rubber dinghy has arrived!"
"Originally, the Filmfest was a festival for German cinema", Hauff explains, "but I saw that one couldn't stage a festival only with German films. It was soon clear that it had to be a festival of international calibre."
"I said from the very beginning that I had something in mind similar to what the Documenta did with the fine arts. From the outset, the directors were totally at the centre of attention. The directors were, so to speak, the bundling of the creative potential, although one shouldn't see this as disrespect for the writers, actors and cinematographers. A festival should show the latest works of artists and it was here that I subscribed to the slogan: we are loyal to the directors! I have always invited films by directors whom we had invited in the past, even when we knew that the new film was perhaps not so good or was rather bad. We wanted to follow their careers".
Clear Structures
Sidebars like the International Programme, "New German Films", "Independents", "Children's Film Festival" developed over the years because, as Hauff points out, "you must offer the people clear structures so that they know what they can expect - for the audience is not only made up of cineastes, who can relate to the name of a director or actor, but also of normal educated people who like going to the cinema".
Thus, it has been very important for Hauff that as much information as possible is made available on the films being screened so that the festival public can make informed decisions when book-ing their tickets.
Competition or No Competition?
As to the question of a competition in Munich, Hauff admits that Berlin was rather suspicious when the Filmfest was launched, "but I reassured Moritz de Hadeln and the Festspiele organisation that we were not going to enter into competition with Berlin. In addition, there is the fact that, according to the FIAPF statutes, each country can have only one major festival with a competition section".
The complete absence of prizes at the Filmfest became a thing of the past, though, when the Hypo-Bank approached Hauff with the proposal of creating a DM 60,000 Young Director's Support Prize to be awarded during the festival in Munich to one of the German films showing in the "New German Films" sidebar.
A particular feature of the Hypo Bank's DM 60,000 Young Director's Support Prize is that it is awarded as an acknowledgement of "the innovative and entrepreneurial achievement" shown by the production team in their making of the film rather than according to purely artistic criteria.
Since then, other institutions have been inspired by the Hypo-Bank's example, e.g. the collection societies VFF's DM 100,000 "TV Movie Award" - presented this year to Ralf Huettner's Die Musterknaben ("Best German TV Movie") and the British docudrama Hillsborough from Granada TV ("Best International TV Movie") - and the GWFF's DM 50,000 "High Hopes Award" which was awarded for the first time this year to the US indie director Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth.
In addition, the Filmfest has followed the lead of other internat-ional festivals and created its own "lifetime achievement award", the "CineMerit Award", to honour the outstanding services to cinema by international figures. Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon (Dead Man Walking) and veteran director Jules Dassin (Never On A Sunday) were the first recipients this June.
Role of Television
Meanwhile, television has been allowed to play an increasingly larger role at the Filmfest in recent years, "although I have been criticised by many people for doing this", Hauff admits. "When you see how films are made, you can appreciate the role television plays here in the financing, development and editorial input".
As Sönke Wortmann's Allein unter Frauen and Peter Sehr's Kaspar Hauser show, the Filmfest's presentation of films origin-ally intended only for the small screen served as a launchpad for these directors' cinemacareers as well.
The same goes for Rainer Kaufmann with his Stadtgespräch which had been shot on 16mm. A 35mm print was then struck after the Studio Hamburg comedy was programmed for the "New German Films" sidebar: "then distributors were lining up to speak to him and ZDF and wanted to release the film in the cinemas (Buena Vista had 1.7 million cinemagoers see the film in late 1995). That encouraged us in the question of how we should handle television nowadays".