Horror and heroes at the Max Ophüls Prize 2018

The 39th Max Ophüls Preis film festival will take place in Saarbrücken from 22 to 28 January this year. The prestigious prizes will be awarded in four different competition categories.

In theFeature film competition are three productions with FFHSH Fundings: Directors Hendrik Hölzemann was already able to win the FFHSH Prize in 2009 with his filmVery close to you won the Audience Award at the Max Ophüls Festival. His new filmAxel the hero (ostlicht filmproduktion) is a fairy tale for adults: protagonist Axel lives beyond the big city in a forest, has money debts and can't even land his childhood sweetheart. He increasingly takes refuge in his fantasy, in which he is not a lonely loser, but Axel the hero. In his feature film debut Outside in my head (Junafilm) by Hamburg native and HfbK graduate Eibe Maleen Krebs is about 28-year-old Sven, who suffers from muscular dystrophy and is given a new FSJ student, Christoph, to help him. After a difficult start, a genuine friendship develops between the two, so much so that Sven confides his dearest wish to him. In Nils Loof's mystery thriller Beyond the mirror (Skalar Film), strange things happen after Julia's twin sister Jette commits a brutal suicide and Julia moves to an old farm with her family to overcome her trauma. Julia is convinced that she can hear Jette's voice and see her ghost. She also has increasing doubts about her sister's supposed suicide and sets off in search of clues. The film was made as part of the Nordlichter series, with which FFHSH, NDR and nordmedia support up-and-coming filmmakers from northern Germany.

In theDocumentary competition it has the productionFollowing Habeck by Malte Blockhaus. The Directors accompanied the Green Party leader and Schleswig-Holstein Environment Minister Robert Habeck from 2014 to 2017 - in a time between election campaign and ministerial office, province and big city. The Documentary was funded by Filmwerkstatt Kiel. The documentaryGlobal Familyy by Andreas Köhler (Made in Germany Filmproduktion) is also screening in the Documentary competition. The film is about a Somali family in exile. Due to a brutal civil war, the family members live scattered all over the world. Shash, the head of the family, wants to reunite them.

In theShort film/medium-length film competition three FFHSH-funded productions will be screened, including two from the Hamburg Media School (HMS). In the short filmBeast by HMS student Sandra Schröder, Karla and Falk run over a dog on the way to their honeymoon and seriously injure it. The HMS first semester film Rotcap by Lynn Oona Baur is set in the year 2032. 10-year-old Luise lives with her mother Anna in totalitarian Germany. During a school performance, Anna realises that she must protect her daughter. Hamburg filmmaker Aron Krause tells the story in the musical filmYour children (Interzone Pictures) 25 years in half an hour: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present day - in the microcosm of an apartment block.

The third part of the short film seriesThe satanic thicket by HfbK graduate Willy Hans runs in the side programmeMOP Shortlist: Fiction. The award-winning portrait of a musicianWild heart by Charly Hübner and Sebastian Schultz (Eichholz Film) about the punk band Feine Sahne Fischfilet will be shown in theMOP Watchlist shown.

Photo: Edition Salzgeber