International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

50 years of the Oberhausen Manifesto

Large scale programme to mark the anniversary

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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oberhausen Manifesto, on 28 February 2012, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is preparing an extensive range of offerings. The festival has gained the cooperation of international partners such as the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television (Berlin), the Film Museum in Munich, Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V. (Berlin), the German Federal Film Archive (Berlin), the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), the University of Vienna, the Goethe Institute (Munich), the Pesaro Film Festival (Italy), filmportal.de and the Museum of Modern Art (New York) to help it plan a series of publications and events. The overall project is made possible by the generous support of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

On the agenda are film series being shown in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, New York, Oberhausen, Pesaro and at Goethe Institutes worldwide, as well as a symposium in Vienna, a book to be presented at the 2012 festival, and a DVD edition. In conjunction with filmportal.de, various texts and materials will be made available online starting in early 2012 on the website www.oberhausener-manifest.com. To kick off the anniversary celebrations, the City of Munich is hosting a special reception on 28 February 2012.

The Oberhausen Manifesto is one of the key documents in German film history. Its twenty-six signatories – among them Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz and Peter Schamoni – claimed the license to create a whole new German film. Their manifesto became the cultural mouthpiece of a generation, expressing the hope for far-reaching changes in social awareness. Looking at the production realities faced by German film today, almost fifty years later, it is plain to see that the group’s mission has lost nothing of its pertinence.

Oberhausen, 13 December 2010

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de, tel 0208 825-3073