The first Münster Film Festival was held in 1981 under the name Filmzwerge – Tage des unabhängigen Films and was purely a short film festival. The competition for short films was the centrepiece of the festival back then and still is today. For many filmmakers, short film is the springboard into the “big” film industry, whether as a calling card for their own talent or as part of their training at a film academy. While the first festivals in Münster screened retrospectives of early short films by Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, among others, the young generation of filmmakers at the time also took off. At the 1988 Filmzwergen, for example, the then 29-year-old Philip Gröning won the short film competition – and received 3,000 Deutschmarks on top. From the early 1990s, he was able to direct feature-length films and celebrated his greatest success to date in 2006, when he won both the German Film Award and the European Film Award for his documentary film The Great Silence.
There are several later winners of the German Film Award in Münster’s festival history: 30 years after her short film award in Münster, director and screenwriter Ayşe Polat won the German Film Award for Best Director and Best Screenplay for her film In the Blind Spot last year. Thomas Wendrich was a guest in Münster in 2005 with his touching short film Zur Zeit verstorben (At Time Deceased ), which won the WDR Sponsorship Award. He is now primarily active as a screenwriter and has been highly decorated for his work, including the German Film Award for Lieber Thomas (2022) and this year’s Grimme Award for his four-part film Herrhausen – Der Herr des Geldes, directed by Münster native Pia Strietmann.
Noémie Merlant on her mobile phone during the 2021 award ceremony (c) Thomas Mohn // Daniel Abma, on the sidelines of the 2015 award ceremony (c) Filmfestival Münster // Till Nowak in the studio (c) Framebox
The programme for the current cinema year also includes former Münster Prize winners. In June, the highly acclaimed documentary Im Prinzip Familie by Dutch director Daniel Abma opened at the Schloßtheater. His short documentary Vorwärtsgang won the Filmwerkstatt Grand Prize in 2015, as did Nikias Chryssos with his short fiction film Hochhaus eight years earlier. Chryssos was once again a guest at the Münster Film Festival with his first feature-length film Der Bunker and this summer he released his techno odyssey Rave On in cinemas.
Till Nowak has probably made it the furthest into the big, international film world. He won his first audience award in Münster for his short film The Centrifuge Brain Project. Many other awards for the mockumentary and its spectacular special effects followed – as well as attention from Hollywood. He is now involved in numerous Marvel films as a concept artist, such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ( 2017) and Vol. 3 ( 2023), Black Panther (2018), Captain Marvel (2019) and this year’s comeback of the Fantastic Four. He also left his visual mark on the live-action remake of The Lion King (2018), Wonka (2023) with Timothee Chalamet and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024). And with Tron: Ares (2025) and the fifth appearance of the Avengers next year, his next projects are already in the starting blocks.
French actress Noémie Merlant has also been a fixture in the international film world for years. Following her breakthrough in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Young Woman on Fire (2019), she starred alongside Cate Blanchett in Tár (2022) and Kate Winslet in The Photographer (2023), among others. Her first own directorial work Mi iubita, mon amour (2021) premiered in Cannes and she won her first award for Best Director at the Münster Film Festival in the same year. Her second own film, Balconettes (2024), has since been released, and the fact that she was much more confident with it than with her debut is certainly also due to awards like the one in Münster, which have given her a boost for her future career.
Once again this year, promising up-and-coming filmmakers whose names may one day be internationally recognised will be competing in the feature film competition for debut films, the short film competition and the Westfalen Connection with films from the region. And we all have the opportunity to experience them live for the first time at the Münster Film Festival – as well as jury members such as Liv Lisa Fries, who was a guest in Münster in 2011 six years before her first appearance at Babylon Berlin, or Dutch acting legend Rutger Hauer, who sat on the jury in 2007 and kept getting lost in Münster’s city centre. But that’s another story and will be told another time …
(first published in films, September 2025)
