interfilm 2020
11 November - 13 Dezember 2020
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!
The longest and most extraordinary festival in interfilm's and KUKI's history was a tremendous success: Over 18,800 digital cinema seats were filled! This gets close to a regular edition (in numbers at least) and we therefore owe a huge thank you to all our viewers.
None of this would have been possible without a reliable digital platform. Special thanks go to our partner Sooner, without whom we would not have managed such a smoothly-run digital festival, especially since the "smart lockdown" was announced just 10 days before the festival was due to begin. We had to reshuffle the festival in the blink of an eye, reallocating budgets, tasking departments with entirely new roles and cancelling all travel arrangements.
Such a radical restructuring of the festival is of course only possible if one's supporting institutions continue to stand by them. Therefore our heartfelt thanks also go to all our festival partners, funders and sponsors, first and foremost Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg, Creative Europe MEDIA and the German Federal Foreign Office!
The interfilm & KUKI team mastered this challenging year and the peculiar circumstances with flying colours. With glittery outfits, disco lights and confetti, we celebrated the start and end of the respective digital editions separately and yet (virtually) together.
The experiences we were able to make in the digital realm will surely serve us well in the near and distant future. But even if the digital floodgates have now been cranked open, the bottom line remains the same: interfilm and KUKI are film festivals.
Film festivals belong in the cinema, to be shared and experienced by crowds of people interacting and exchanging. Therefore, our priority is and will continue to be focussed on striving for on-site experiences.
Incidentally, to support the cinemas, 20 percent of the proceeds from Sooner and interfilm will go to the cinemas originally scheduled for the festival.
But the most important thing about a film festival are the films themselves. Here, too, we must express our deepest gratitude to the filmmakers who made it possible for us to present their films in a digital context, who made themselves available for digital Q&As, who participated in our digital networking events, and who encouraged us in these uncertain times.
interfilm awarded prizes worth more than a total of 40,000 euros. We are particularly delighted by the strong resonance that many of the award-winner's received in their respective countries, for example in the Philippines ("Tarang") and in Hong Kong ("1 a.m. in Hong Kong") - click here for the laudations.
INTERFORUM masterclasses and panels are still online, as are the ceremonies for the opening and awards events and the Decolonial x interfilm Short Film Walk through Berlin's history of European and German colonialism.
And while we are super pleased with our first digital festival edition, we really can't wait to (hopefully) hold a physical festival once again next year at our cool cinemas with lively audiences, crazy parties, too many drinks and wonderfully irritating & inspiring talks.
