Filmfest Hamburg Details
by Becky Tan

This year featured the thirty-second Filmfest Hamburg, which showed 124 films from fifty-five countries in fourteen cinemas. This successful festival filled the cinemas with over 59,000 visitors. Altogether there were discussions with 312 film-related guests from twenty-nine countries. A new event was the Day of Free Tickets on October 3. On this one day, five festival cinemas plus neighborhood cinemas were 90% full of enthusiastic viewers happy to see thirty-five showings.

We greeted a new director: Malika Rabahallah, who has taken over from Albert Wiederspiel (who was director 2003–2023). Rabahallah is German-French, fifty-three years old and has worked as producer, author, and director in Cologne, Boston, Costa Rica, and Berlin. She was the manager of MOIN Filmförderung from 2011–2023, which supports filming in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. She has been living in Hamburg since 2009.

I was happy that fifteen films fit into my busy schedule of going to film press showings and babysitting grandkids. This year I decided not to become accredited, but just to buy tickets as a “normal” person. This turned out to be more expensive, and I found myself in the movies late afternoon and evening, rather than in the morning.