INTERFILM 40 International Short Film Festival Berlin
5 - 10 November 2024

Viewing and Curation 2024

We are expecting 3000 film submissions again this year. They will be screened and evaluated in teams and then selected by curators for the different sections in a lively exchange. Here are the heroines of the screening and curation 2024 - the curators are also part of the viewing team:

Alexander Stein

studied film, theater, ethnology and journalism in Berlin. After his studies he learned film animation at Kaskeline Filmproduktion and realized his own animated films as well as stage designs and projections for the Schaubühne Berlin, Schauspielhaus Hamburg and for the world exhibition spectacle "Flambee" in Hannover 2000. He joined interfilm in 1998 and took over the role of producer.

Viewing and Co-Curation: Essay Films (Reality Bites) & Eject

Amrei Keul

studied German and Romance languages and literature and initially worked in the theater. From 2018, she discovered film festival work for herself (CinEScultura in Regensburg, Alcine Film Fest in Spain, Fünf Seen Filmfestival in Starnberg). She started as a volunteer at the Regensburg International Short Film Week in 2019 and soon joined the team as a screener, moderator and curator. She has been co-director of the festival since October 2022.

Co-Curation: Focus On Body Politics

Andrea Schwemmer

studied theater and film studies as well as acting in Berlin and New York and has appeared on stage, TV and film. She curates for various international film festivals, including interfilm Berlin, Filmfestival Max Ophüls Preis, Arab Filmfestival San Francsico (2014-2019) and plays and sings in the all female swing band The Toolbox Orchestra. She also works as an on-set coach and acting coach (Young Talents), gives acting and pitch trainings, e.g. for the DFFB Berlin and the KUKI Film Festival and moderates film screenings, panels and events at international (film) festivals.

Viweing and Co-Curation: International Competition

Barbara Fickert

is a blogger and the initiator and managing director of Kinoblindgänger gGmbH. She produces accessible film versions (including “Der Rausch”) and also works editorially on audio descriptions for other producers. Since 2020, she has been a member of Hörfilm e.V., the association of German-speaking film describers. In 2021, Barbara was accepted into the Friends of the German Film Academy.

Co-Curation: Barrier-free short film program

Brenda Akele Jorde

is opening the festival for the forth time as a presenter. Previously, she curated and hosted the documentary screenings for children 10+ at KUKI and enjoyed discussing film with children. She is a documentary film director, circus educator, acro yoga teacher and loves movement and dance above all else.

Viewing and Curation: German Competition

Cord Dueppe

studied film studies and has been part of the interfilm team since 2016, where he does the international distribution of our short films and also co-curates the International Competition.

Viewing and Co-Curation: International Competition

Felipa Goltz

has been into interfilm and KUKI from an early age, was a member of the children's jury and a youth curator and grew to love the medium here. After a brief detour into sociolinguistics, she studies production design at Babelsberg Film University and works as a freelance director, graphic designer and in the production department. Having been an activist since her teenage years, she has been part of the climate justice movement since 2019.

Co-Curation: Green Film Competition

François Serre

is an expert in immersive and interactive technologies and directs the Courant3D film festival in Angoulême. He is a specialist in sound and cinema, directs short films and documentaries, and animates conferences. This expertise allows him to serve as a jury member or curator for numerous festivals. For INTERFILM, he has developed several immersive short film programs together with Alexander Stein, which will be screened at the Zeiss-Großplanetarium in Berlin.

Curation: Virtual Reality meets Full Dome

Fredi Klutas

is an ultra-long-term student of German philology and something with culture. She has been a permanent part of the KUKI team since 2018, where she organizes, screens, curates, feeds social media, bakes cakes, and co-curates Teenage Riot. And because she likes all weird things, she is also co-curator of eject.

Viewing und Co-Curation KUKI & Eject - The long night of weird shorts

Guy Parker

studied experimental film and video and screenwriting. He has supplied small gauge film equipment to artists and short film makers for over 20 years and has written about film and video for various outlets. He is specifically interested in the Media Archaeology of film and video devices, obsolete media and the materialism of the moving image. He is currently a member of the artist film lab LaborBerlin.

Curation: RETRO Alle Macht der Super 8

Ilana Glizer

came to interfilm through an internship. Since then she somehow can't get away from the films. Views and co-curates Queer Fever. She is in charge of the festival website at achtung berlin and at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival she is involved in the program and guest management. She is currently learning the business of livestreaming in a video production.

Viewing and Co-Curation: International Competition & Queer Fever

Katharina Blum

studied cultural studies and management, worked in the music event sector until the pandemic and since then in music management, as a music journalist, author and DJ. She also produces music herself, for example at the Interfilm Festival for sound&vision. For the past three years she has been scoring short films together with her friend, roommate and co-producer Yule Post and this year she and Yule will be presenting at Interfilm Sound&Vision for the first time.

Co-Curation: Sound & Vision

(c) David Dollmann

Lena Whooo

is an artist, actress, and author from Berlin. After graduating in Literature and German Studies, they received a scholarship at the New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts. Currently, Lena commutes between New York and Berlin. As an initiator and organizer of cultural projects, Lena aims to create community spaces and question societal structures. Additionally, Lena has moderated formats such as “TEDx Youth Munich,” “Black FLINTA Perspectives,” “GEMS NEXT DOOR,” and the “Joy & Pain Conference” at Rutgers University, New Jersey. In 2022, Lena published their first book, “un-fulfilled,” with Novum Verlag. The book offers readers poetry and short stories about identity and freedom. Moreover, Lena launched the “Write to Heal – Journaling Workshop” for QTIBIPOC. In this workshop, Lena provides participants in NYC and across Germany with tools and methods of journaling to initiate individual and collective change through (self-)efficacy, thereby increasing visibility for the Black community.

Co-Curation: Black Bodies (WT)

Leon Baumgartl

has been with interfilm since 2013. Starting with an internship at KUKI, he was able to gain insights into almost all departments of the festival over the years. Since 2016 he co-curates and co-produces "eject". He also makes music and likes to play at an interfilm party.

Co-Curation: Eject - The long night of weird shorts

Maliek / Velvet Buz

studies film and theater science at FU right now (even though she treats it more like a side hustle). Usually Maliek is in front of the camera as well as on stage and dances since fae is four years old. In her free time, she loves being creative or fight for the rights of TIN* people. Since fae fell in love with Interfilm in 2021 fae just can’t get enough of it! 

Viewing and Co-Curation: Fokus On Body Politics

Matthias Groll

has been an interfilmer for over 20 years. He studied sociology and journalism, enjoys writing book reviews, published the book "Das Digital" in 1998 and recently published "When Shiva rages, the world shakes - Hinduism as an adventure in everyday life in India". He has been curating at interfilm since the beginning, he looks after the website, organizes the monthly, nationwide short film programme series Shorts Attack and loves gardening.

Viewing und Co-Curation: International Competition and Green Film Competition

Monica Koshka-Stein

was born in Australia to Chinese-Russian and German immigrants and settled in Berlin in her early twenties in 1993. She has always been involved in music, film, performance and art and has worked at interfilm Berlin since 1998. Monica became Artistic Director of KUKI Young Short Film Festival in 2011, leads KUKI’s film-curation workshops for teenagers, gives talks and curates short film programs for festivals and institutes around the world. In 2021, she joined the short film selection committee at Berlinale-Generation and developed the digital film education platform, Kurzfilm im Klassenraum that was launched in 2022. Her focus lies on the inventive and empathetic potential of the cinematic short form and how film can help young people feel at home in the world and in themselves. For the adult side of interfilm, she researches films and co-curates the genre programs and Teenage Riot.

Viewing KUKI and Co-Curation KUKI

Moritz Lehr

co-curates documentaries, mockumentaries, music videos and everything in between. He has made short films and music videos, but actually comes more from music and is active as a Dj. He studied art, music and media, where he first came into contact with short films: love at first sight.

Viewing and Co-Curation: Documentaryfilmcompetition & Reality Bites

Philipp Kutz

successfully dropped out of an unhealthy degree course to rock a technical apprenticeship instead and is now industriously sitting in the office for money or travelling around. As a cultural work balance he has been drifting through various media landscapes for years and ended up as a volunteer at Interfilm in 2017. His penchant for tinkering and his open heart for absurd curiosities quickly became apparent and so it was practically inevitable that he has been co-curating and co-producing the show ‘eject’ ever since.

Co-Curation: Eject - The long night of weird shorts

Ralf Krämer

is a freelance journalist and works as an author of audio descriptions and plays. With the project “Berlin lacks the words”, he advocates multilingualism in the communication of the Berlin Senate.

Co-curation: Barrier-free short film program

Rebecca Heiler

studied Translation / Interpreting (English and Spanish) and holds a master degree in Eastern European Studies. She focussed on Russian and Czech literature and the recent history of Eastern Europe. Her master's thesis has the titel "Another Way of Seeing. Female Directors of the Czechoslovak New Wave." During her studies in Munich she began organising film events. In 2016 she moved to Berlin and started working for interfilm in 2018. She manages the distribution at interfilm, co-curates the German Competition and runs the talent workshop Script Pitch. Beyond interfilm she also works for festivals such as goEast in Wiesbaden and Berlinale Forum.

Viewing and Co-Curation: German Competition

Ronja Seifert

did an internship at Interfilm in 2019 and has been hooked on short film ever since. They studied Art History and Communication in Social and Economic Contexts at the UdK in Berlin, are interested in literature (modern) and horror films (bloody) and write themselves (miniatures). In 2024, Ronja is co-curating ‘eject – the long night of the weird shorts’ for the second time and is in charge of the festival's social media channels.

Viewing and Co-Curation: eject - The long night of weird shorts

Sarah Dombrink

is acquisition manager for interfilm Berlin's Short Film Sales & Distribution since 2018. Before that, she worked for the interfilm festival in variety of positions starting as location manager in 2011. In between, she graduated in Media Studies at the Film University Babelsberg. She co-curates the German competition and is a member of the Festival Curatorium, the artistic directorial team.

Viewing and Co-Curation: German Competition

Tavo Ruiz

is a proud queer writer and director, born in Nezahualcóyotl, México. His short films "Line 9" (2016), "Juan Gabriel is dead" (2018) and “Portraits of my mother” (2019) screened at prestigious film festivals such as OutFest Los Angeles, Max Ophüls Film Prize and Morelia Film Festival. His feature film script “Acapulco Magic” was one of three finalists at the Guanajuato Film Festival screenplay competition, with this project he won the feature film in development fund at the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE), was mentored by Mexican filmmaker Fernando Eimbcke thanks to the mentoring program at Filmnetzwerk Berlin DFFB. He took part in the Gabriel Figueroa Film Fund at Los Cabos Film Festival, and also was invited to Gotham film week in New York , and thanks to the program La Fabrique and the French Institute, he got invited to Cannes Film Festival in 2022.

Viewing and Co-Curation: German Competition & Queer Fever

Yergalem Taffere

@yagitown is a Berlin-based filmmaker and visual artist specializing in film, photography and performance art. She graduated from the Filmarche in 2011 in the Cinematography program. In 2021 she received the INITIAL 1st scholarship from the Academy of Arts for her photographic work and research, Hidden Figures, and as part of her former performance collective Luftpflanzen, took part in the Hamburg Fluctoplasma Festival 2021.
Her artistic practice and works mostly revolve around Afro-diasporic feminist and political perspectives that she owes to her ancestors.

Co-Curation: Black Bodies (WT)

(c) Julian Bauer

Yugen Yah

is a filmmaker from Berlin and is always looking for exciting stories that want to be told. With his podcast "Indiefilmtalk" he creates a discussion platform for the film industry and gives a fresh view on film and the creative process behind.

Co-Curation: International Competition

(C) Christian Schneider

Viewing

Beatriz Martínez

studied Adiovisual Communication and Film production in the university between Spain and Italy. Once in Berlin, she did a formation in eventmanagement and started her participation in film festivals through Achtung Berlin. Since then she is in love with this branche and fully enjoy working in several festivals in the city. She works with the accreditated guests in the Berlinale, is in the film selection, guestmanagement and organisation of the Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin, was collaborating with ZEBRA Poetry in the jurymanagement and is doing the presentors and volunteers coordination in INTERFILM since a few years. Besides films she loves learning languages and she has set up her own business in which she works as a translator and spanish teacher since more than 15 years.

Dominique Ott-Despoix

was at interfilm for the first time in 2020, studied film studies and social and cultural anthropology in Berlin and Berkeley, worked for various festivals, writes about film and loves to discuss it. Lives for cinema (especially from Hong Kong) and is involved in the Filmrauschpalast in Moabit in his spare time, where he helps to shape the program, among other things.

 

Hussen Ibraheem

Lebanese filmmaker Hussen, an architect-turned-director, blends architecture with film, exploring themes of life, death, and family dynamics. Currently, he's writing and directing his debut feature, selected in Meditalents, MFI, Cairo producers network, Rawi, Meeting on the bridge, and Thessaloniki co-production market. With his projects, he obtained Netflix Equity Fund, ile de France Grant, development fund of (PACA), DFI, AFAC, and others. He is an alumnus of Berlinale Talent - Beirut, Qumra, Sundance script development with Rawi, ZFF Academy, Camerimage, and other programs. He is studying international production at the Filmakademie BW, to bring a perspective shaped by his diverse background in directing, writing, and architecture.

 

Javier Weisson Dubke

studies film studies, Latin American studies and French philology in Berlin, and works part-time in the cinema. His enthusiasm for film has led him to support some short film projects and to realize some others himself. In 2023, he completed his internship at interfilm and became part of the screening team in 2024. Since 2016, he continues to explore the Berlin cinema and art landscape.

Ludmila Pogodina

has been working for interfilm since 2009 - as a journalist, DJ at festival events, moderator of the program “Watch That Man! David Bowie Music Video Retrospective 1969-2013” in 2014, curated the Special Program - Spotlight: Belarus in 2022 and is screening in 2023. She studied journalism and is a writer, photographer, DJ, art manager and co-founder of the art collective/community #KeepMinskWeird.

María Cristina Hervás

The passionate cinephile studied film history before transferring to the Film Academy to study directing. As early as 2001, she was a member of the international jury at INTERFILM. She is a regular member of the Script Pitch Jury and has been a member of the festival's pre-selection committee since 2018. Since 2023, she has also been evaluating short films for the Almagro International Film Festival (AIFF). Currently, she is serving as the program coordinator there and curates for the Spanish competition. She lives in Berlin as a freelance author. She lives in Berlin as a freelance author.

 

Monira Kamal

is a freelance filmmaker from Berlin. After studying media design for two years, she studied animation at the Film University Babelsberg and has since worked as a freelancer on a wide range of productions in the fields of animation, videography and film design. Her special fable is the mixture of animation and live action material, which is also reflected in her own film productions, which have been shown and awarded at international film festivals since 2012. Monira has been Head of Marketing & Social Media at the Festival of Animation Berlin since 2017.

Moritz Mehnert

started as an intern at interfilm in 2018 and since then has been ensuring the smooth running of the events in the various locations every year as venue manager. He studied art history and film studies in Jena, as well as media studies in Weimar, once ran a small short film festival himself and is currently initiating film events in his adopted hometown of Jena. Animations, documentaries and slow storytelling are somehow his thing and he melts away with analog film images.

 

Natalie Heinrich

is an illustrator and comic artist based in Berlin with a special interest in short film, animation, and film festivals. During the last 6 years she has been part of several comic projects and events, designed posters and book covers, sells her own art in her onlineshop and started studying animation at Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in 2019. She is currently working on her graduation film and schedules her week around cinema visits, pen-and-paper sessions, yoga classes to get some movement in those shoulders and snuggling her cats.

Nico Übersax

is a fan of moving images that make you think, challenge conventions or strike an emotional chord. During his film studies, he learned to love all forms and colors of film and enjoys exploring new, refreshing audiovisual paths. He has already worked in various areas of the film industry, from production and distribution to cinema and festival operations. The most important thing for him is always to make inspiring cinematic voices heard by a curious audience and thus help shape our colorful film culture.

Sofia Jamatte

Bevor sie zu interfilm kam, arbeitete sie in verschiedenen Kulturräumen in Berlin. Während ihrer Zeit bei Interfilm in den Jahren 2022/2023, zunächst als Venue Managerin und dann im Filmversand, vertiefte sie ihre Leidenschaft für das Kino und entwickelte eine Wertschätzung für das Format Kurzfilm. Neben ihrem Studium der Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften hat sie Freude daran, Filmvorführungen zu organisieren, Videokunst zu erkunden und in das vielfältige Berliner Kulturangebot einzutauchen.

 

Stefanie Borowsky

was part of the Interfilm team as an editorial assistant in 2023 and joined the viewing team for the first time in 2024. She studied Spanish and French specializing in literature, and Psychology in Münster and Barcelona and also focused on Spanish and French-language theatre and film as part of her studies. She writes film reviews in German and French for Berliner Filmfestivals, Indiekino, Kino-Zeit and Filmlöwin, among others. Stefanie is a member of the European Film Academy and loves feminist and coming-of-age movies from all over the world.

Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel

has been screening for interfilm since 2012. He studied German and Romance languages and literature as well as media and communication studies. After his time at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, he went to the Deutsche Kinemathek in 2009. Since 2006 he has been the artistic director of the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.