The 30th Hamburg Film Festival came to an end on Saturday evening with the awards ceremony. The NDR Young Talent Award for feature film debuts or second directorial work, endowed with 5000 euros, went to the director Emmanuelle Nicot for her film “Dalva” (Belgium/France, 2022).
Nicot shows the path of twelve-year-old Dalva, how she tries to be a child again after severe abuse, with emotional sharpness and psychologically precise, without ever exposing a character, the jury praised.
Daniel Goldhaber received the “Political Film” award from the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, which is also endowed with 5000 euros, for his film “How To Blow Up A Pipeline” from the USA. The film deals with the fight against the climate catastrophe in an exciting, entertaining and uncompromising way.
The Arthouse Cinema Award of the International Association of Artistic Film Theaters and also 5000 euros went to “Close” (Belgium, France, Netherlands, 2022) by director Lukas Dhont. The film is said to be an impressively mature artistic achievement by a young filmmaker. He manages to lightly tell a serious and deeply human story of friendship and separation, love and loss, supported by two outstanding young actors on the verge of teenage years.
The Hamburg producer prizes, each worth 25,000 euros, were awarded on Friday evening. “The Miracle of Cape Town” by producer Christian Popp was honored as the best German television production. The producers Tobias Walker and Philipp Worm for “Aus meine Haut” (director: Alex Schaad) as well as Michael Reuter, Saar Yogev and Naomi Levari for “Victim” (director: Michal Blaško) also received awards. Producer Christian Beetz received a special prize for serial formats amounting to 10,000 euros for “Reeperbahn Spezialeinheit FD65” (directors: Georg Tschurtschenthaler, Carsten Gutschmidt, Ina Kessebohm).
Festival attracts guests from all over the world to Hamburg
The anniversary edition of the Hamburg Film Festival was attended by 477 guests from 31 countries, including festival and filmmakers from Ukraine. They organized their national short and feature film competition at the “Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival” in Hamburg’s Alabama cinema.
A total of 116 feature films in ten sections from 58 production countries were shown at the film festival. 41,500 visitors were counted at the box office – 7.8 percent fewer than in the last festival year before the corona pandemic in 2019.
