Awards & Winners
INTERFILM Festival
4. - 9. November 2025
4. - 9. November 2025
Awards & Winners
Otaghe Khali / Empty Room
Soroush Alizadeh / Ali Sedaghat // Iran // 2025 // 18:30 min
"The Jury extends a Special Mention to an intimate film that beautifully and succinctly embodies the complex layers of memory and remembrance. Powerful in its simplicity, yet profound in its implications, this film is a visual reminder that what we hold on to, isn’t set in stone, but always has new angles that can provide insight into past loves, meaningful relationships, and our understanding of grief and longing. Our Special Mention goes to “Empty Room” by Soroush Alizadeh & Ali Sedaghat."
"While watching the German Competition program, we recognized how international and diverse filmmaking—and the film industry—in Germany truly is. Through the visions of artists from varied and diverse backrounds, a German Filmbild emerges, reflecting the true Stadtbild of contemporary Germany—a Stadtbild defined by plurality."
Cycle of Violence: Puppy Please!
Felicia Bergström // Germany // 2024 // 06:06 min
"Dieser Film macht Verletzlichkeit und Gewalt spürbar und zieht die Zuschauer:innen in eine Schleife hinein, die von einem dramaturgischen Crescendo bestimmt ist. Durch den Einsatz einfacher Materialien als erzählerisches Mittel wird diese Erfahrung auf einzigartige Weise nur durch Animation möglich. Unsere lobende Erwähnung geht an Cycle of Violence: Puppy Please! von Felicia Bergström".
"The film makes fragility and violence tangible, drawing the viewer into a loop within which a dramaturgical crescendo unfolds. By using simple materials as a narrative tool, this experience is made uniquely possible only through animation. Our special mention goes to “Cycle of Violence: Puppy Please!” by Felicia Bergström."
""We live in a time shaped by wars that displace millions and kill on an unimaginable scale, a time marked by genocide and colonial violence, and by a planet pushed toward collapse through unrestrained capitalist exploitation. In such a world, documentary cinema is not a luxury – it is a necessity. It gives voice where silence is enforced, presence where erasure is deliberate, and where forgetting would be more convenient.
We, the documentary jury, want to express our deepest gratitude and respect to the filmmakers who shared their work with us – many of whom continue to film in places were speaking openly, recording openly, or simply being who they are carries personal risk. Your films remind us that art is not apart from the world: it is a form of resistance, a shelter for memory, and what keeps truth alive when silence would be easier."
Unser Name ist Ausländer / Our Name Is Foreigner
Selin Besili // Switzerland // 2024 // 20:00 min
"In a time when belonging, identity, and home are questioned this film gives voice to those who live between worlds. It captures the quiet ache of trying to belong and the strength that emerges when acceptance is withheld. What begins as exclusion transforms into an act of reclamation – of voice, of space, of “Stadtbild”, of the right to exist and to shape one’s own place. Channeling rage into grace and empowerment, this film is an emancipatory force for all who have been called “Ausländer”. For the courage of its vision, the clarity of its voice, and the tenderness of its politics, the Special Mention goes to “Unser Name ist Ausländer” by Selin Besili."
Ru ni suo yuan / Correct Me If I'm Wrong
Hao Zhou // Germany, USA // 2025 // 22:59 min
"In an experiment on their own body, the filmmaker captures - in intimate situations and striking images – how their traditional Chinese family attempts to cure them of their queerness. As they subject themself to home remedies and spiritual interventions, they find humor within tragedy and reveal the absurdity behind these boundary-crossing rituals. The film becomes both testimony and a site of resistance: the personal becomes public, the wound becomes visible, the body becomes an archive. It lays bare the forces that discipline, shame, and silence. The jury gives a Special Mention to “Correct Me If I’m Wrong” by Hao Zhou."
Mahmoud IBRAHIM – Kafr el Dawwar – Athens (Egypt)
"With a strong sense of place, it captures the soul of a city that risks disappearing. The film contrasts the official narrative as an anti-narrative from someone that comes from there and has no power over the city’s transformation. He uses the power of cinema to preserve a place dear to him and gives a voice to workers’ dreams and fears. We want to give this Special Mention to Mahmoud Ibrahim for the script “Kafr el Dawwar – Athens” because we believe that he has a lot more stories that he can tell."