The Jury | European First Feature Film Competition
Katharina Huber // Ziska Riemann // Huw Wahl
Katharina Huber is an artist and filmmaker from Cologne. After studying at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and the Royal College of Art in London, she worked in the field of short film and animation. Her latest short film The Natural Death of the Mouse was awarded the German Short Film Award 2020, among others. The essay film Out of the grades, which she made as co-founder of the studio Huber Casalprim, premiered at FID Marseille in 2018 and won awards at Documenta Madrid, among others. Her first fiction feature, A Good Place, produced under Acker Film, screened at this year’s Locarno Festival, where it won two awards. One of them for best director for a debut film.
Ziska Riemann works as a director, comic artist and screenwriter in Berlin. Since 1991, she has published various comic albums (including Future Subjunkies, Space Bastards, Rascal & Lucille, Starship Eden, Kraft durch Freunde), four of them in collaboration with Gerhard Seyfried. In 2004 she founded the record label MerMer and released her solo album Wo hier bitte geht’s nach Shambhala? alongside other artists. She wrote the screenplay for the feature film Die Hunde sind schuld in 1999 and the cinema documentary Conny Plank – The Potential of Noise, which was released in 2017. She has written and directed three feature films to date Lollipop Monster (2011), Electric Girl (2018) and Get Lucky (2019). Her style as a filmmaker is visual and pointed, and obviously influenced by her work as a comic book artist.
Huw Wahl is a filmmaker whose work has been screened internationally at film festivals such as CPH:DOX, Festival du nouveau cinéma and Open City Docs, in art galleries like Centre Pompidou Metz, the Bluecoat and the Whitworth. He has won several international awards with his films, and they’ve featured in magazines like Sight and Sound and The Wire, and received funding from organisations such as Arts Council England, The Henry Moore Foundation, and the Royal Photographic Society. His film The Republics ran in competition at the LITFILMS Literature Film Festival Münster in 2020. Wahl is currently working on an arts council funded film that explores the art of engineless sailing, and is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester on the AHRC funded project Creative Adaptive Solutions for Treescapes Of Rivers (CASTOR).
The Jury | European Short Film Competition
Michelle Barthel // Erec Brehmer // Fitore Muzaqi
Michelle Barthel, born in Remscheid in 1993 and raised in the Münsterland region, began taking ballet lessons in preschool and was active in school theater. In 2002, she took part in an audition for the feature film The Tenth Summer and was promptly cast. This was followed by her first smaller roles, before her breakthrough came in 2009 with Aelrun Goette’s social drama Keine Angst. For this role, she received the Promotional Award at the 2010 German Television Awards, the Marler Television Award for Human Rights and the FIPA D’OR at the 2010 International Television Festival in Biarritz; together with director Aelrun Goette and screenwriter Martina Mouchot, she was also awarded the Grimme Prize. In the years that followed, further roles followed in Tatort films, on Bella Block and in the Tel-Aviv crime drama, among others. She had her first leading role in cinema in Gregor Schnitzler’s Gaming Instinct (2013). She co-starred with rapper Sido in the film Eine Braut kommt selten allein (2017), as well as for the feature film The Ground Beneath My Feet directed by Marie Kreutzer, which screened in competition at the Berlinale in 2019. Most recently, Michelle Barthel was seen in the 70s comedy Goldjungs.
Erec Brehmer (*1987) is a feature and documentary film director, screenwriter and editor living in Munich. After training as a media designer for image and sound at ZDF in Mainz, he studied directing at the University of Television and Film in Munich (HFF). His practice films screened at numerous festivals, including the Max Ophüls Preis Film Festival and CamerImage, and won numerous awards. Erec graduated in 2019 with the feature comedy La Palma, which was screened in competition at Filmfestival Münster in 2019 and released on DVD and Netflix in 2021. His latest, very personal documentary Who We Will Have Been screened in competition at DOK.fest Munich 2021 and Hot Docs Festival 2022 in Toronto. The film was shortlisted for the German Film Award and was released nationwide in Germany in July 2022. Erec has also edited numerous documentaries, including Jud Süß 2.0 by Felix Moeller and Harraga by Benjamin Rost.
Fitore Muzaqi is a screenwriter and director living in Cologne. In her work as a writer she deals with cultural differences, feminist issues and injustice in an absurd-comic yet serious way. 2009-2013 she studied Literature, Culture, Media and Social Sciences at the University of Siegen. In her Master’s she studied Communication Arts – Narrative Environments at the Braunschweig University of the Arts (2013-2016). After her studies she worked as a writer, director & creative producer for WDR and Cologne-based production companies. 2021-2023 she graduated in Serial Storytelling (MA) at the International Film School Cologne (ifs). She is a founding member of Female Filmmakers CGN and since 2023 a board member of DDV (German Screenwriters Association). Her music video Conny – Drake is not happy either ran in the short film competition at the Filmfestival Münster in 2021.
The Jury | Westfalen Connection
Adam Riese // Katharina Schröder // Johannes Ueberfeldt
Since 2007, the Münster-based entertainer Adam Riese has hosted his „Adam Riese Show,“ a colorful mix of talk, fun and music. As a presenter, he presents cultural events, panel discussions or benefit galas. Of course, he has also moderated several times at Filmfestival Münster. As an author, Adam Riese has written books and essays about his hometown of Münster. The mathematician sang in punk bands in the 1980s.
Katharina Schröder studied media, social and film studies in Bochum, Gothenburg, Amsterdam and Paris. While still a student, she worked for various film festivals, including as a volunteer for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and in the festival office of Kinofest Lünen. She is a freelance presenter and curator. Since 2020, she has been responsible for various program areas at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and became part of the management team of the blicke filmfestival des ruhrgebiets in the same year.
Johannes Ueberfeldt studied philosophy, German studies and cultural poetics of literature and media at the WWU Münster. His research interests include film theory as well as media and cultural semiotics. He was a co-founder of the Film Cluster at the Collaborative Research Center „Law and Literature“, published on Slow Cinema and the Anthology Series, among others, and conceives film series in addition to podcasts. With a practical seminar on film criticism, he accompanied the LITFILMS Literature Film Festival 2022 together with Andreas Blödorn and Daniel Kothenschulte.