Please note that this is a rough translation used to assist the interpreters on opening night!

Dr. Lars Henrik Gass

Director of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen:

Opening speech for the 53rd International Short Film Festival

3 May 2007, Lichtburg Filmpalast, Oberhausen

Not to be published before 3 May 2007, 8:00 p.m.

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Lady Mayor,

State Secretary,

Members of the federal parliament and the parliament of Northrhine-Westphalia,

City councilors, sponsors,

Guests and friends,

I would like to welcome you to Oberhausen on behalf of the International Short Film Festival!

For what is now the tenth time we are holding this festival in the heart of Oberhausen, in the last remaining cinema of Oberhausen's city centre. Tonight - quite in contrast to our normal habits - we would like to take stock of the festival's history, the reason being the ongoing financial crisis of public cultural promotion, but also, more importantly, the question of what the mission of a film festival is - especially one that deals with a marginalized genre - at a time when film is slowly, but possibly irreversibly, is turning its back on the cinemas.

One of the most intractable stereotypes about short film today is that it is a dying genre. However, the opposite is true! Today, many more short films are being made than 50 years ago. We here in Oberhausen, for example, had to view 6,500 entries this year, not even counting the films we saw during our many visits to other festivals. What is indeed dying out is the standardized short film as a trailer to the long feature film. However, we are not mourning this kind of short film. Let us instead be happy about the wealth of short formats which - thanks to music television, the internet, the art market and new digital technologies - have evolved in the last few decades! If you look at the short film as a film of short length, it is actually better-off than ever. It is significant exactly because it has virtually no economic relevance: it makes sure that film does not become an ossified structure; it is the breeding ground for film.

Short film has of course seen profound changes in the last few years, and we had to respond to these. And so we did, not by -

as we hope - resorting to short-lived measures, but by deciding to make Oberhausen a place of lively debate. Let me give you seven examples of this:

1. The introduction of the MuVi Awards for the best German music video in 1999, for example, was such a forward-looking decision: not only did it lead to debates and to polarisation, it also triggered a considerable public response to the first music video award for filmmakers at a film festival worldwide. Dealing with pop culture in the context of a short film festival was not a populist concession to commerce. It was and it still is an ongoing reflection on artistic innovation which uses the special characteristics of music.

2. Extending the thematic programmes of the festival was another important measure which aimed at juxtaposing a topical, substantial question to the recurring competition programmes. These programmes also helped to tap new audiences.

3. By expanding the range of topics, the introduction of the "Podium" series was an attempt to show what future festivals could look like. These are not exclusive discussions for insiders only, but they address questions of cultural policy and of social relevance, like for example - in this year's programme - the privatization of film experience.

4. Offering screenings of internationally renowned distributors of experimental film and video art has brought new attention to Oberhausen as a meeting point for the trade audience. Unlike other film markets in the world, Oberhausen specifically invites distributors with similar profiles and target groups.

5. Throughout the year, the short film festival offers media education on short film at Oberhausen's schools. This project is the only one in Northrhine-Westphalia and intends to get children acquainted with the wide range of cinematic forms and cultures.

6. The development of Reelport: a digital platform enabling filmmakers in less developed countries as well to enter films without major technological hurdles and without having to struggle with customs procedures. Reelport is the only distribution platform allowing comprehensive management of entries, including functions for registering, handling, screening and projecting films.

7. The establishment of shortfilm.de: not only is it the only international magazine for short film, it is also an excellent platform to promote German film.

The positive impact of all these developments is reflected in the figures:

1. Compared with 1998, the number of entries rose by 240 percent. So according to the number of entries, Oberhausen is the largest film festival in the world. And here I would explicitly like to thank the selection commission for mustering the physical, psychological and intellectual energy all these years to condense this enormous amount of films to a consistent programme.

2. Media coverage of the festival reached 80 million people in 2006, which is 450 percent more than in 1999.

3. The number of specialist visitors, especially from the sphere of arts, has risen considerably. The same applies to the number of private visitors: between 1998 and 2006, it climbed by approximately 150 percent.

However, it was also an economic decision which has made the short film festival more flexible and professional since 2000: the decision to change the company form and turn it into a non-profit limited liability company. From our point of view, this created more advantages than we could list here tonight. In particular, the new company form helped to make major saving. But is also helped to develop a sponsoring concept that goes far beyond the traditional form of patronage. Thanks to this concept and the untiring work of Marcus Schütte, we have managed to balance the losses of public funding we had to suffer in recent years. The share of our own funds is now approximately 500 percent higher than in 1999 and equaled 15-20 percent of all income.

"It is not enough to hold a film festival," the previous director of the festival, Angela Haardt, had told me. "You also have to define its societal function."

This is why we believe that the 2010 Cultural Capital Ruhr should also develop a holistic approach, including social, economic and artistic aspects, which tries to find answers for today's pressing issues like the ageing of society, unemployment, exodus and the decline of urban societies in the Ruhr region.

We believe that culture does not gain legitimacy by pleasing everyone, but by remembering its social responsibility: not by serving the existing society as an event, but by contributing to its reinvention. Culture has to see itself as a driver of social change and of social participation. This may imply confrontation with the traditionalists who, as part of the division of labour in society, assign to culture an entertaining, possibly critical, but not an active or creative role.

We will keep on interfering and standing up for our understanding of culture as a process of social participation - whether people like it or not. This relates to issues like cultural promotion and the issue of film funding in particular, but also to the role of culture in society, its future development and legitimacy.

For a festival that lent its name to the most important manifesto of German film and that was among the pioneers of film promotion in Germany, it is only natural to look both for the right terminology to explain what film culture means and for new funding instruments. One of the "Podium" sessions will be devoted to this question: "Which kind of funding does the short film need?"

A vibrant film culture includes a debate on its goals and its methods, as Hans-Heinrich Grosse-Brockhoff, State Secretary for Culture, writes in the foreword of the festival catalogue: "audacity and the ability to take criticism".

In his contribution to our book "kurz und klein" in 2004 - which, by the way, you can buy in the entrance hall - Ulrich Gregor, one of the most famous figures of German film, commented on the significance of the Oberhausen Manifesto: "It does not seem that we are currently living in a period of upheaval but rather in a period of consolidation, we could even say uniformity. Economic success and the ability to compete on the market are turned into fetish values. But what does this mean for difference, for variety, for cultural diversity? (...) Which role should public funding policies play? Are they about further strengthening and supporting products that are commercially successful anyway or about promoting cinematic experiments and risk-taking without which the entire film scene would be doomed to stagnate?" - These are courageous words which may sound radical to our ears today.

It should be hard, particularly in Germany, to find assessment criteria as they naturally exist for fine arts, original criteria with no commercial background, to be applied to film. Alexander Kluge's ideal formulated in 1964 of "film for its own sake" still is utopian. The piece of art is to be judged with the absolute standards of art while film is to be judged at the box office. The widespread idea that film is art starts to have an ideological touch if it includes basically anything and if funding is directed mainly to one thing: to what is successful with the mainstream public. Here politicians should really come out and say which kind of film they want and at what price.

Today an artistic film will have difficulties finding the right place for its screening or distribution: galleries and museums are governed by the cult status of the art object, and cinemas are dominated by commercial feature films. This year's "Kinomuseum" theme is thus programmatic: on the rubble of museum and cinema, we want to create something new which will eventually also raise questions about us, the festival, and which will hopefully lead to new answers.

The collective experience of cinema will soon be a relic of the past or at least play only a secondary role. Due to the fall of cinema, film festivals which earlier also had to be markets, gain new cultural importance and responsibility because they have become the only public for most films. This is where we are - and were - able to see and discuss what has long disappeared from television and movie screens. The film festivals can become the place of renewal for film; they could be the future of film. This new, historic situation would of course have to be reflected in a re-orientation of funding. The festivals are hardly able to fulfil this new role. We would therefore like to see a dialogue with the decision-makers in this country, a dialogue which aims at defining a new cultural approach to film funding which takes into account the fundamentally changed economic, technological and social conditions.

In conclusion, let me tell you a little story: I recently met a filmmaker at the Rotterdam film festival. He was presenting his 58th film. Over the last decades, he has been showing long and short films, but mainly artistic films at the world's most prestigious festivals, also in Oberhausen. However, none of his 58 films was ever shown in cinema, none of this 58 films was ever bought by a television company. I therefore wish that there could be a place where we would be able to see his films on a regular basis, a place which really corresponds to his films' ambition, a place for its own sake.

Finally, on behalf of the International Short Film Festival I would like to thank all those who have contributed to the festival. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude and respect to the City of Oberhausen for its long-standing support and its trust. I thank the State Chancellery of Northrhine-Westphalia, the Federal Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs, the Foreign Office and the Federal Office for Political Education. My thanks also go to our premium sponsors NRW.Bank and Narcamar, our Web sponsors. I thank the sponsors BMW Group, EVO, Stadtsparkasse Oberhausen, T-COM and Ströer/DSM, our media partners arte, 3sat, KiKa, Deutschlandradio, K.West, INTRO, Bunch TV, MyVideo, netpoint media, Tracks/arte, as well as our technology partners Panasonic, Medion, Pictorion/Das Werk, ARRI, Gürtler Multimedia, SVK.

My personal thanks go to the team of the International Short Film Festival.

I thank you for your attention and I wish you an inspiring stay in Oberhausen.