17-24 October, 2024
Best of FILM FESTIVAL COLOGNE 2023
Sessions & Events
Sessions & Events
European Series Day
Every year, the European Series Day presents the most important trends in the European series…
Sessions & Events
Focus on Film Policy
The film and media industry is facing major challenges: New streaming and distribution models, AI…
Sessions & Events
Global Day. Stories for Change
Moving images as a development policy toolGlobal Day. Stories for Change presents strategies and…
Sessions & Events
NRW-USA-Jahr 2023/2024
A perfect match! Under this motto, the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia is honouring its…
Sessions
Networking Event Benelux Meets NRW
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg share a common living and economic space with North…
Sessions & Events
Fair Production in Cologne
The working conditions in the film and television industry increasingly fail to meet the…
Sessions & Events
European Work in Progress Cologne (EWIP)
European Work in Progress Cologne connects international feature films in production with…
Sessions & Events
International Distribution Summit
The cinema industry is undergoing fundamental change. How can independent film distributors find…
Sessions & Events
Cologne Comedy Connector
The Cologne Comedy Connector is a space for collaboration where newcomers and professionals can…
Best of Cinema Fiction
HIT MAN
The opening titles reveal a “somewhat true story”: Gary Johnson is a part-time college lecturer and…
ALL OF US STRANGERS
A love story, a ghost story or rather a film about overcoming trauma? Andrew Haigh (45 YEARS)…
PERFECT DAYS
Hirayama is cleaning public toilets in Tokyo. It’s not a dream job, but still the silent elderly…
THE BOOK OF SOLUTIONS
Filmmaker Marc is retreating to his aunt’s house, with his latest movies’ raw footage in his…
MAY DECEMBER
The scandal’s over, but not forgotten: Twenty years ago, Gracie, then in her mid-30s, left her…
HOMECOMING
Jessica and Farrah spend the summer with their mother on Corsica, where both sisters were born. The…
EVIL DOES NOT EXIST
After his Oscar winner DRIVE MY CAR, Japanese filmmaker Ryūsuke Hamaguchi enchants us once again…
THE GOLDMAN CASE
It was a trial that kept France on tenterhooks: in 1976, author and left-wing activist Pierre…
RED ISLAND
The last relics of the French colonial empire from a child’s point of view: Robin Campillo (120…
MONSTER
Did Mr. Hori slap his student Minato – or did Minato actually abuse his classmate Eri? Nothing is…
HOW TO HAVE SEX
Summertime, finally! Tara, Skye and Em travel to Crete. Graduation is behind them, the future is…
ANATOMY OF A FALL
Did he jump or was he pushed? That’s for a court of law to decide after a family father is found…
Program
Awards
Artist Talks 2023
Artist Talks
Film Award Cologne - Justine Triet
Justine Triet became only the third woman to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes in May for her feature…
Artist Talks
The Hollywood Reporter Award - Xavier Dolan
At 34 years old, Xavier Dolan is already a cinema veteran. At 16 he wrote the screenplay for I…
Artist Talks
phoenix Award - Olfa Al Hamrouni
The role of cinema is to fathom the complexities of the human soul, says Tunisian filmmaker…
Artist Talks
International Actors Award - Oliver Masucci
A German actor on his way to Hollywood: Oliver Masucci, born in Stuttgart in 1968, trained in…
Best of Cinema Documentary
FOUR DAUGHTERS
In 2014 the two eldest daughters of Tunisian woman Olfa Hamrouni disappeared. Eight years later,…
CLOSE TO VERMEER
The large-scale Vermeer exhibition this spring attracted 650,000 visitors to the Amsterdam…
PICTURES OF GHOSTS
An essay film both profoundly personal and universal by Brazil’s most important contemporary…
RYŪICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS
In March of this year, composer and pianist Ryūichi Sakamoto passed away after a long battle with…
MENUS PLAISIRS – LES TROISGROS
For 55 years, the Troisgros in the heart of France has been a three-star restaurant. In 2020, a…
YOUTH (SPRING)
After having already collected awards in Locarno and Venice, Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang…
THE GULLSPÅNG MIRACLE
A divine inspiration leads two sisters to buy a flat in the titular small Swedish town. They are…
LITTLE GIRL BLUE
After her mother Carole’s suicide, director Mona Achache found photos, letters and sound recordings…
KIM'S VIDEO
Kim’s Video used to be New York’s finest video store – maybe the finest in all the world. Among the…
SMOKE SAUNA SISTERHOOD
Southern Estonia’s sauna culture is part of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list. But Anna…
NAM JUNE PAIK: MOON IS THE OLDEST TV
These days Nam June Paik is mostly famous as a video art pioneer. Lesser known is that he tried his…
Top Ten TV
OF MONEY AND BLOOD
French media called it the “fraud of the century”: small-time crooks from the Parisian immigrant…
THE CURSE
The road to hell is paved with good intentions – that could have been the motto of this mad and…
ONE TRILLION DOLLAR
With great fortune comes great responsibility. Andreas Eschbach’s bestseller, which served as the…
JULIET
A Belgian crime drama, psychologically precise and suspensefully staged: After the death of her…
WHAT COUNTS
From dream vacation to nightmare: In 2004, the tsunami wave in Thailand sweeps away Harry's wife…
HOUSE OF GLASS
A wedding in the family. But what is supposed to be a hopeful beginning becomes the starting point…
FELLOW TRAVELERS
Hawkins Fuller moves confidently on the slippery political stage of 1950s Washington. As an…
THE NIGHT LOGAN WOKE UP
There’s a storm brewing over the Larouche family – literally and figuratively. Mother Madeleine is…
TRUNK
28-year-old backpacker Malina wakes up in the trunk of a moving car. She has no memories and no…
DAVOS 1917
During the first World War, international agents scrimmage in front of the eponymous spa town’s…
Look
AGRA
The Indian city of Agra is known worldwide for the Taj Mahal. In his second feature film, Kanu Behl…
Concert & Film: GIFT
A very special evening: composer and multi-instrumentalist Eiko Ishibashi performs live to…
DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD
Like its predecessor, Berlinale winner BAD LUCK BANGING LOONY PORN, Radu Jude’s latest feature is…
MICHEL GONDRY – DO IT YOURSELF
Coinciding with his new feature film THE BOOK OF SOLUTIONS (see p. ??) comes this tribute to the…
LOOK SHORT FILMS
The subjects could hardly be more different, but all the films in this programme use existing…
EUREKA
Argentina’s most experimental director Lisandro Alonso (JAUJA) starts EUREKA as a Western in the…
BABYLON
A recently restored, unique contemporary document from the early Thatcher era: BABYLON tells the…
NO LOVE LOST
Erwan Le Duc combines the bittersweet lightness of the Nouvelle Vague with a modern father-daughter…
TERRESTRIAL VERSES
Scenes from a life under an authoritative regime: in just under a dozen episodes that are as apt as…
THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING
It's not often that a German movie features images as powerful as Timm Kröger’s mixture of mystery…
NRW-Competition
MONSTER INSIDE
This character and this performance will be talked about all season: Sandra is in jail for…
FOSSIL
FOSSIL tells the story of Michael, a steadfast coal miner who has worked on a bucket-wheel…
SCHOCK – KEIN WEG ZURÜCK
German genre cinema is alive and kicking! Bruno, a doctor from Cologne, loses his licence but…
THE DIARIES OF ADAM AND EVE
Was life in paradise really paradisiacal? Or did the sparks occasionally fly between Adam and Eve…
THE SIREN
This touching and visually powerful animated film tells of survival in the First Gulf War from a…
DIE KINDER AUS KORNTAL
This shocking documentary about the systemic abuse in the children’s home of a free church…
THE SETTLERS
Chile at the beginning of the 20th century: landowner Menéndez hires three men to open a route…
THE DIVE
Not only arthouse, but also international genre cinema has been produced by the Cologne company…
KIDNAPPED
In the 19th century this case made waves all the way to the US: In 1858 Vatican soldiers stormed…
VIENNA CALLING
Documentary filmmaker Philipp Jedicke follows his protagonists from the rooftops to the sewers,…
LOST IN THE NIGHT
Since he can’t rely on police or the judiciary, Emiliano himself goes on the hunt for the people…
GOODBYE JULIA
Mona is being consumed by feelings of guilt after covering up a murder. The former singer, married…
A GOOD PLACE
A village in decay, two young women, news of a rocket launch, people are disappearing – is homo…
Special Screenings
EHER FLIEGEN HIER UFOS
Marita Baumanns lives in Niersdorf, a town on the Lower Rhine that is due to give way to lignite…
THE LONG SHADOW
At least 13 women were murdered by the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed the “Yorkshire Ripper”…
FREIHEIT IST DAS EINZIGSTE, WAS ZÄHLT
The madness of the attempted coup by the Reichsbürger group gets distorted beyond, or rather…
ifs Showcase: Final Pitch MA Film
This year, the ifs Internationale Filmschule Köln presents the projects of the first year of the…
Work in Progress: AI and the metaverse in Fiction
DOPPELHAUSHÄLFTE – META is the first complete episode of a fictional German series to be filmed in…
FOSSIL
FOSSIL tells the story of Michael, a steadfast coal miner who has worked on a bucket-wheel…
TATORT KÖLN – PYRAMIDE
For their 88th case, legendary Cologne investigative duo Ballauf and Schenk take a look into the…
WAS WIR FÜRCHTEN
The teenage years as pure horror: To escape the stress of the big city and her panic attacks,…
WOHIN MIT KURT
Since his childhood Kurt Brock has lived on the edge of a wild settlement not far from Cologne’s…
DAS MÄRCHEN VON DER ZAUBERFLÖTE
Mozart’s popular opera in a modern adaptation for the Christmas fairy tale film series “Six at One…
BLINDSPOT
Max is a brilliant but unscrupulous salesman of international spy software. When his wife falls…
#UNDWARUMBISTDUHIER
In the middle of the second lockdown came the first production, that Annette Frier planned, shot on…
THE WALKING DEAD: DEAD CITY
The dead are walking again. More precisely: they stagger, stumble and limp through a…
EWALD LIENEN – EINE GRIECHISCHE TRAGÖDIE
Ewald Lienen was an exceptional figure in German professional football in the late 1970s and 1980s,…
Stories for Change
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