Slovak director Michal Blasko’s debut feature Victim has won the Hamburg Producers Prize for International Cinema Co-Productions at Filmfest Hamburg.
The €25,000 prize sponsored by Hamburg’s Senate for Culture and Media was presented to the film’s German co-producers, Michael Reuter and Yogev Saar of Berlin-based Electric Sheep.
Victim debuted in Horizons at Venice Film Festival earlier this month, going on to play in Contemporary World Cinema at Toronto.
The film follows a Ukrainian immigrant living with her son in a small Czech border town. She is devastated when he is assaulted by three Roma people; but then she begins to spot inconsistencies in his story.
Speaking to Screen after the ceremony, Saar who is also the founding partner of the Tel Aviv-based Black Sheep Film Productions, recalled that he had boarded Blasko’s project after it was pitched at the connecting cottbus East-West Co-Production Market in 2018.
The film is being handled internationally by Pluto Film and will be released in German cinemas by Rapid Eye Movies.
The three-woman jury of sales agent Valeska Neu, producer Nurhan Sekerci-Porst and talent agent Gabriele Czypionka also gave a special mention to Sol Bondy and Fred Burle of One Two Films for their co-production of Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider.
Meanwhile, the Hamburg Producers Prize for German Cinema Productions - also with a cash prize of €25,000 - was awarded to Tobias Walker and Philipp Worm of Munich’s Walker + Worm Film for Alex Schaad’s debut feature Skin Deep which had its world premiere in Venice’s Critics’ Week .
Two awards were presented to German TV productions screening in the Filmfest’s Televisionen sidebar with cash prizes sponsored by the collection society VFF.
The €25,000 prize for the best TV film went to Producers at Work Film’s Christian Popp for his production of Franziska Buch’s The Cape Town Miracle about the first heart transplant in history.
And the €10,000 prize for the best serial format was was presented to Christian Beetz and Florian Fettweis of Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion for the high-end true crime docu-series Reeperbahn Special Unit 65.
Reeperbahn Special Unit 65 was the first documentary series in the Filmfest’s history to be selected for its TV competition.
A jury of young Hamburgers aged between 12 and 16 picked Christophe Barratier’s Le Temps des Secrets as their favourite film for the € 5,000 Michel Prize at this year’s edition of the Michel Children and Youth Film Festival.
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