Filmfest Bremen

In the organizer's words:

The idea for the film festival arose from the joint work of Bremen filmmakers. It all started with Ilona Rieke from Filmbüro Bremen e.V. and Matthias Greving from the production company Kinescope Film. They agreed that Bremen is an ideal festival location in terms of infrastructure and target audience and that, in addition to the existing platforms for networking Bremen filmmakers, there must also be a Bremen film festival that offers local productions an appropriate audience, brings the works and their makers into dialog with each other - in the medium term also nationally - and thus promotes the networking of the film and media scene.

With this in mind, they initiated the first Filmfest Bremen in 2015. For 24 hours, only films with a Bremen connection were shown in the CinemaxX on Breitenweg.

This was followed by the second and third Filmfest Bremen, each year with one more day of festival programming, a steadily increasing number of KLAPPE! short films and viewers as well as a change of location to the Filmkunsttheater, and finally - with the Fourth Filmfest Bremen - the first international opening of the festival program in the new sections "Innovation" and "Humor/Satire".

In April 2022, Filmfest Bremen took place for the seventh time and featured a range of international and regional competitions. At the heart of the festival were the "Humor/Satire" and "Innovation" sections, which were unique in Germany and featured films from 38 countries, as well as the competition for the audience awards for the best films from Bremen and the region. The "Focus" section showed international productions on a specific topic. In 2022, the focus was on "Sustainability".

For the first time in 2022, there was also a retrospective for the winner of the "Bremen Film Prize", which is awarded as part of the festival for special comedic works and achievements. In 2019, it went to director and Oscar winner Caroline Link, in 2020 to Hape Kerkeling and in 2022 to Aki Kaurismäki.

In the short film section, Filmfest Bremen presented several special formats: The 48-hour short film competition "Klappe!", the cine film competition "St-8 of the Art" and the interdisciplinary experiment "Super 8 Expanded" in which silent film, live music, spoken word and performance came together.

Since the festival was founded, it has been important to the Filmfest to make Bremen visible as a film city and production location, to act as a networking platform and to inspire filmmakers and audiences alike. The festival sees itself as a media innovation laboratory and stage for German and international film art and entertainment. The prizes are awarded by annually changing juries, which in previous years have included renowned filmmakers such as Milan Peschel, Pola Beck, Petra Nadolny, Burhan Qurbani, Ruth Thoma, Johanna Wokalek and Sky du Mont.