Helge Albers on Hamburg’s MOIN film fund slate and working with Filmfest Hamburg

Helge Albers, CEO of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein’s regional film fund MOIN, is full of praise for the smooth transition from Albert Wiedersspiel to Filmfest Hamburg’s new director Malika Rabahallah.

“It’s fun working with the Filmfest,” Albers says, pointing out that “this had already been the case with Albert and it’s even more so with Malika.”

Albers and Rabahallah previously worked together at MOIN, where Rabahallah was head of the funding department before taking over at Filmfest Hamburg in January.

”We have a genuine spirit of cooperation where we can be like sparring partners bouncing ideas off one another, so I know that we will then be sitting together straight after the festival comes to an end to start talking about the 2025 edition,” says Albers, a former producer who has headed up the fund since April 2019 and whose contract was recently extended for another five years until 2029.

From the outset, Rabahallah has sought to put a greater focus on the festival’s Industry Days strand, says Albers. “That’s something we particularly welcome and are there to support her in that.”

This year MOIN is a partner on the fifth edition of the industry Explorer Conference, as well as on a series of events being organised with the German Film Academy, three Hamburg media law firms, European Film Promotion and the Encourage Film Talents platform.

“This cooperation between the Filmfest and MOIN is likely to grow even closer together over the next few years,” Albers predicts.

Fund-backed films

This year sees a record number of 21 films screening in the Filmfest’s programme that have been supported by MOIN, which allocated €9.5m of its budget to feature film funding in 2023. 

”The portfolio of films is evidence of the breadth and diversity supported here by MOIN, stretching from animation films through documentaries to high-end series and feature films,” says Abers. He cites “feature films with mass appeal” like The Door-To-Door Bookstore, or “very edgy ones” like Skill Issue which premiered in Locarno, as well as “major arthouse titles” such as The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Happy Holidays.”

The line-up of MOIN-backed productions also includes the world premieres of Canadian-born, Hamburg-based director Carly May Borgstrom’s mystery thriller Spirit In The Blood and Kerstin Polte’s tragicomic episodic film Highly Explosive. There are also German premieres for Danish filmmaker Charlotte Sieling’s drama Way Home, Algerian Karim Moussaoui’s second feature The Vanishing and the children’s animated film Animal Tales of Christmas Magic as well as the eight-part TV series Black Fruits which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last June.

“What unites all of these films is their quality and the Filmfest has become the place where all the films can come back to where they started out on their journeys into the big wide world,” Albers explains.

There have been two key highlights of the past year for Albers: the Oscar nomination for İlker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge and the success of Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig following its world premiere at Cannes in May, including its selection as the German Oscar candidate for the international feature film category.

Further success stories include Hamburg Media School graduate Tamara Denić winning the Student Academy Award in bronze for her short Istina (Truth) and Matthias Glasner’s family drama Dying taking home four statuettes from this year’s German Film Awards after premiering in the Berlinale’s Competition.

In 2023, 16 MOIN-backed feature films and eight high-end series filmed in the region, ranging from Julia von Heinz’s Treasure, Sarah Winkenstette’s Greetings From Mars and Ameer Fakher Eldin’s Yunan to high-end series including Lamin Leroy Gibba’s Black Fruits and Pia Strietmann’s The Next Level.

Media hub

2024 has seen locations in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein play host to productions as diverse as Çatak’s new feature Yellow Letters, Fatih Akin’s historical drama Amrum and the James McAvoy and Julanne Moore-starring action film Control directed by Robert Schwentke for StudioCanal and The Picture Company.

“In terms of infrastructure, we are a fully developed media hub because we have all you need here to produce feature films or high-end series,” Albers suggests. “There is a well-developed services landscape and our skills programme Get On Set is already producing tangible results.”

Moreover, the number of international filmmakers making Hamburg their home and a place to work on new film projects has been “constantly growing”, according to the film funder.

For example, Rasoulof’s The Seed of The Sacred Fig was co-produced by his Hamburg-based company Run Way Pictures and Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat has been living in the city and developing her new project No Good Men there since leaving her home country after the fall of Kabul in summer 2021.

“I’m really happy people have started taking notice of this [development] because Hamburg as a port city is very cosmopolitan. It’s in our DNA to think internationally - you can see this from the international co-productions we have backed over the years - and we want to support and build on this in the future,” Albers notes.

• Filmfest Hamburg’s Malika Rabahallah and Kathrin Kohlstedde talk changes, challenges and future plans