Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds Of Kindness, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, are among the films that will screen in CineMasters, the main competition of this month’s Munich International Film Festival (MIFF), taking place from June 28 to July in Germany.
Fourteen films are in the running for CineMasters’ €50,000 ARRI Award which is presented to the producers of the best international film. Further titles include Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught By The Tides, Rúnar Rúnarsson’s When The Light Breaks, which premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section last month, as well as Jaione Camborda’s Golden Shell winner The Rye Horn and Austrian-Iranian Sudabeh Mortezai’s political drama Europa.
2024 will mark the first edition of the festival under the leadership of festival director Christoph Gröner and artistic co-director Julia Weigl. They will be presenting 150 feature-length fiction and documentary films from 53 countries, 62 of these titles having their international, world, or European premiere in Munich.
CineVision and CineRebels competitions
A further 14 titles have been selection for the CineVision competition for emerging directors, including two films fresh from their world premieres in Cannes in May - Argentinian director Federico Luis’ Simon Of The Mountain and DoP Carson Lund’s directorial debut Eephus. Also screening are UK writer-director Luna Carmoon’s debut feature Hoard and Canadian filmmaker Harley Chamandy’s Allen Sunshine which will have its world premiere in Munich. The €15,000 CineVision award is sponsored by the Motion Picture Licensing Company.
Meanwhile, Isabella Eklöf’s Kalak, a drama set in 1990s Greenland, and Scott Cummings’ experimental non-fiction Realm of Satan are among the 14 titles selected for the CineRebels competition, dedicated to experimental filmmakers.
The films competing for the €15,000 award, sponsored by Audi and with an additional €5,000 in prize money compared to last year, also includes theatre and film director Emma Dante’s Misericordia, based on her 2020 play of the same name, Minh Quý Truong’s Vietnamese-Filipino romantic drama between two coal miners Viet and Nam, and Ukrainian Maria Stoianova’s found footage film Fragments Of Ice.
CineCoPro award
This year will see the revival of the CineCoPro competition after a four-year break. The German production partners of 10 international co-productions showing in the MIFF programme are eligible for a cash prize of €100,000 to be invested in a future co-production.
A jury comprised of writer-director Baran bo Odar (Dark), Leonie Benesch, lead actress of the Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge, and producer Sol Bondy of Berlin-based One Two Films (Armand) will decide on the winner from a line-up that includes Turkish filmmaker Nehir Tuna’s debut feature Dormitory, Argentinian co-directors Maria Alché and Benjamin Naishtat’s comedy Puan, Karim Aïnouz’s Cannes 2024 competition title Motel Destino, and Yasemin Samdereli’s Italian-German co-production Samia.
The latter is based on the true story of the Somali athlete Samia Yusuf Omar, which had its world premiere in Tribeca Film Festival’s International Narrative Competition before its screening in Munich.
CineKindl Award
The former Kinderfilmfest München will be held for the first time this year under its new name of CineKindl, which is also the name of the €2,500 award sponsored by the Munich-based production company megaherz since 2022 for the best directorial work in this section.
A three-person jury led by producer Philipp Budweg of Lieblingsfilm will decide on the winner from films including Lucy Cohen’s debut feature Edge Of Summer, Peruvian filmmaker Franco Garcia Becerra’s second feature Through Rocks And Clouds, and Clara Stella Hüneke’s graduation film Sisterqueens.
In addition, five young adults from Munch aged between 18 and 24 will make up the newly-created Young Jury which will award a prize to “a film that tells an impressive story from the world of young people’s experiences”.
The Young Jury’s competition line-up of 12 titles was selected by the festival’s programmers from various sections and includes Fernanda Valadez’s Sujo (CineMasters), Jan Hendrik Lübbers O Chale (New German Cinema), Hisham Zaman’s A Happy Day (International Independents), and Sean Wang’s Didi (CineKindl).
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