Jenni Zylka, former director of the Berlinale’s discontinued Perspektive Deutsches Kino section, has taken on a new role to discover films by up-and-coming German filmmakers, working closely with the country’s film schools.
The €5,000 Heiner Carow Prize, sponsored by Germany’s Defa Foundation, will now be awarded to a first or second German features screening throughout the festival, either in Competition, Berlinale Special, Encounters, Panorama, Generation, Forum or Forum Expanded.
The prize had been awarded to a German film screening in the Panorama until 2019. Since then (excluding the online year of 2021), the winners have been selected from films showing in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino sidebar. Fabian Stumm was this year’s winner for the screenplay of his debut feature Bone And Numbers.
This latest development comes after Berlinale co-directors Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek announced in July that as part of a package of cost-cutting measures and a refocusing of the festival’s overall structure, the Perspektive Deutsches Kino sidebar would be discontinued immediately.
This section had been showcasing up-and-coming local filmmaking talents at the festival since 2002, including the debut features by filmmakers such as Johannes Naber, Anne Zora Becchared, Sonja Heiss and Dietrich Brüggemann.
However, this decision attracted widespread criticism from within the German film community, including the German arthouse cinemas association Bundesverband kommunale Filmarbeit (BkF). It argued in an open letter the films by rising German filmmakers “need their own visible section for encounters, film discussions, opportunities for exchange between filmmakers and the audience”.
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