The distribution of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is based on one of the oldest and most important short film collections worldwide. Every year the Festival purchases around 50 new works from the current festival programme, plus numerous titles from our archive.
Overview
The distribution of the Festival is based on one of the oldest and most important short film collections worldwide. Every year Oberhausen purchases around 50 new works from the current festival programme, plus numerous titles from our archive. Our distribution is international and non-commercial. You can borrow individual titles, programmes prepared by us or programmes you have put together yourself. We are happy to help you with the compilation. If you would like to show short films as supporting films, we have compiled a suitable selection, for which we offer special conditions. Please allow for sufficient lead time when ordering.
A new option is to rent films from the 2021 distribution programme for online use as well. Our distribution programme 2021 is now available.
Under Film Search you can browse our distribution stock from 2000 to the present, create film lists and place orders. If you are interested in older titles, please comtact us. Older works from the collection can only be lent if the necessary rights are available, the condition of the copies allows it and we know the location of the original materials.
Our distribution programme 2021
All 51 new purchases from the 2021 festival are available for on-site screenings and, under certain conditions, online. We have also expanded our list of titles that are particularly suitable as supporting films.
We have already compiled some selection programmes from the competitions of the last festival for you
• International Competition 2021
• German Competition 2021
• MuVi Award 2021
• Art and Experiment 2021
• Award Winner 2021
New is the children's film programme Finding Ways, which is suitable for children from the age of three. The current programmes are supplemented by the programme Made in Germany 3: Migration, which also includes older titles. In addition, eleven works from the film series Can and Should We Make Films Now?, which were originally published in the festival blog 2020, are still available for distribution. The first two parts of the series Made in Germany and some older programmes from the area of Children's and Youth Film will also remain available.
Terms and Conditions
Fees per screening from distribution list (films from 2000-2021) for on-site and online screenings:
Programme up to 80 min. | € 180 |
Programme up to 100 min. | € 200 |
Programme MuVi Prize 2021 | € 150 |
Making discoveries (children's cinema) | € 150 |
per title up to 20 min. | € 40 |
per title over 20 min. | € 60 |
*Archive films (before 2000) will be charged an extra 50%.
A copy processing fee of € 10 will be charged for individual films and existing programmes, and € 20 for newly curated programmes, along with transport costs and 7% VAT where applicable.
In the case of regular loans of short films as supporting films, we give the following discount:
10 short films (one screening each) | € 220 |
20 short films (one screening each) | € 350 |
No copy-processing fees are charged for the regular, discounted loan of single films.
The proceeds from online distribution go almost entirely to the rights holders of the rented works.
Oberhausen on Tour
Short films can only be found on YouTube nowadays? Not quite: Oberhausen on Tour, the bi-annual tour of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, demonstrates that short film is successfully conquering screens and niches beyond traditional theatrical exploitation.
Every two years, Oberhausen sends short films from its programmes out into the world under the title "Oberhausen on Tour". Most recently, the 2019 edition made a played at well over 50 venues on five continents, from the Weltecho cinema in Chemnitz to the Bioscope in Johannesburg.
The 12th edition of the project is currently underway. The first event took place at FilmoTeka de Catalunya in Barcelona in April. After an interruption due to the pandemic, the Oulu Film Center in Helsinki, the NOASS Art Center in Riga, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand, and the De Cinema in Antwerp, among many others, are now following in the summer. In Germany, the Caligari FilmBühne in Wiesbaden and the Filmpalette in Cologne are among the first stops of the current edition of "Oberhausen on Tour 2021".
The partner venues range from film clubs, cultural centres, art house cinemas, kinotheques, Goethe Institutes and film festivals to renowned art institutions. They benefit from reduced rental fees as well as from special promotional materials such as the specially produced cinema trailer for "Oberhausen on Tour 2021” (director, editor and sound designer: Christian Schön).
Dates
30/06/2022
Arsenal, Berlin (re-selected)
Dhaka Tokai, Christoph Hübner, BGD 1986
11/07/2022
22/07/2022
Bilderwerfer Open Air, Wiesbaden
Das satanische Dickicht – DREI, Willy Hans, DEU 2017
approaching the puddle, Sebastian Gimmel, DEU 2014
Die klaffende Wunde, Jovana Reisinger, DEU 2020
Beyond Beach, Clara Winter/Miguel Ferráez, DEU 2018
29/07/2022
Bilderwerfer Open Air, Wiesbaden
Top Down Memory, Daniel Theiler, DEU 2020
04/08/2022
Bilderwerfer Open Air, Wiesbaden
Wer sagt denn das? (Deichkind), Timo Schierhorn/UWE, DEU 2019
Contact
Carsten Spicher
spicher(at)kurzfilmtage.de
Current Offer

New Purchases A–Z
Supporting films A-Z
In addition to the full-length short film programmes, you can also schedule single short films as supporting films and hire them from us. We have compiled a selection of works suitable for supporting film from the distribution acquisitions of the last five years.
Moreover, all those who wish to regularly rent supporting films are entitled to our new quantity discount. For example, we offer the rental of ten short films per year (with one screening each) for 220 euros, 20 short films per year (with one screening each) can be rented for 350 euros (in each case plus transport + 7% tax if applicable, until 31.12.2020 5%, VAT). The German Federal Film Board (FFA) has also been encouraging the screening of short films as supporting films in Germany for several years with a subsidy of up to 80% of the verified costs for film rentals, advertising and transport.
Films Online
Since December 2020 you can also rent short films from us for online playback on VoD platforms. The following must be ensured: the films will be published for film-historical and media-related purposes exclusively in streaming mode (no download) and only in the non-commercial context of a presentation of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. The films may not be put online for longer than 48 hours per release. The VoD platform may only be accessible to registered users.
Almost 100 titles are currently available for such rental. All titles available for rental are new purchases from the 2020 and 2021 festival programmes. The list of film titles will be continuously expanded. Here you will find our new acquisitions from the festival year 2021:
Can and Should We Make Films Now?
The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen invited filmmakers to make short videos responding to the question "Can and should we make films now?". Payment for each production was equivalent to the normal fee for a psychotherapy session in Germany. Producing the videos was thus not allowed to take more than an hour.
"With its commissioned series, Oberhausen has provided compelling proof that filmmaking is exactly the right form of thinking about life and has given the essay a convincing vitality boost. If anything is to remain after Corona, please let it be this thoughtful form of lightnes." (Artechock, Germany, 14 May 2020)
International Competition 2021
Seven works from the International Competition and the newly introduced International Online Competition of the 2021 Festival will be presented. nga'i nang is a film about a son who returns to his family in Nepal to say goodbye to his dying father. In his intimate portrait, the filmmaker explores his relationship with his homeland as well as the world of traditions and rituals he thought he had left behind. The animated short film Cântec de leagăn, on the other hand, explores the innermost depths of a family ravaged by domestic violence and alcoholism. Full of humour, in Suodji a woman decides to cheat death in the face of the Corona pandemic. In Josef Dabernig's film, a dominant woman directs and reprimands several men around renovation work on a villa - without any words at all.
Sensory Overload is a light-hearted film with an existential undertone in which time, form and space flow into each other in the search for a way out of reality. Anne Haugsgjerd reflects on family, ageing and the fluidity of time with vivid clarity and witty humour. Finally, Jayne Parker portrays the triforium of London's Westminster Abbey, which for 700 years has absorbed the soaring prayers.
German Competition 2021
This programme brings together some of the most interesting works to come out of the German Competition and the newly introduced German Online Competition of the 2021 Festival. Top Down Memory deals with manipulations of history in the context of the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace. With the help of Mussolini, Karl Liebknecht and Justin Bieber, among others, the film describes the political significance of the balcony and asks who writes our history. In the silent film Levantado do Chão, a man undertakes a somnambulistic city walk beyond constraints and time. X is a cinematic ancestral ritual in honour of the spirits of the Ruhr area, in which Mareike Wegener imagines a devil's pact as the last resort for people who can no longer find work. (Steve) Temple, on the other hand, treats the Ruhr area as a fictional landscape and anarchic space where people live in spontaneity and cooperation free of hierarchies.
While Simon Rupieper notes that pixels get smaller and smaller with age, a cyber entity connects with an international feminist network in feminism is a browser_materialisation, trying to find out why it exists and what became of the utopias of the internet. In the process, the film sets up an experimental monument to some of the pioneers of cyberfeminism.
MuVi-Award 2021
In 1999 Oberhausen introduced the world’s first festival prize for music videos. The impulse to create this award arose out of the observation that music videos had increasingly managed to emancipate themselves from their purely illustrative and advertising function, transforming themselves into a completely independent visual form. Today, music videos have proven themselves to be an independent short film genre that even managed to survive the decline of its midwife, music television. This programme gathers together all works nominated for the 2021 MuVi Award, supplemented by two artistically outstanding videos from Great Britain and Iran.
The 1st Prize in 2021 went to the deepfake music video Junge Milliardäre, in which a band member uses artificial intelligence to become a singing Elon Musk who swings his hips without restraint. Christine Gensheimer looks back to the pioneering days of computer graphics in The Source of the Absolute Knowledge, awarded the 2nd Prize, and playfully lets human meet machine. The MuVi Online Audience Award went to Mishka Kornai for NOAH. The video follows people who go into telephone booths to make phone calls.
Art and Experiment 2021
These six works between black box and white cube make use of very unusual aesthetics and techniques. Pole Žin shows the development of the North Bohemian landscape and the efforts to implement utopian ideas. {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves is an artistic exploration that rethinks relationships between culture and climate change. Széphercegnő is a simulation that describes the conflict between one's own movements and inevitable limitations.
Un très long temps d'exposition discovers and connects images and narratives of world and private history. With her simultaneously analytical composition of chains of image motifs, Chloé Galibert-Laîné makes visible the political-ideological dimension of technological imaging processes. Doors of Reception is a collage of door sounds from various science fiction films that create an abstract sound painting of opening and closing colour fields Finally, Before the fall there was no fall. Episode 02: surfaces shows how historical traces manifest themselves in Srebrenica and how gradually fading graffiti evoke a mural of testimony.
Award Winner 2021
This programme includes almost all the major award winners of the 2021 festival. The selection is opened by Toumei na watashi, the winner of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen. Using various animation techniques, found footage and still images, Yuri Muraoka tells a personal story about life, its difficulties and its beauty. The experimental Trampa de luz lets us rediscover nature and shows us its wonders through the photochemical materiality of celluloid. Kalsubai explores the story of the goddess Kalsu and her significance for the women of Bari. The film relies on images that explain nothing and explores an extraordinary mythology that empowers women to live non-traditional lives.
Proll!, awarded the Prize of the German Competition, is a feature film about the "working poor" and the loneliness of our time. In the film, everyone fights for themselves, whether as a click worker, parcel delivery person or warehouse worker. The film does not establish a sentimental common ground where there is no common ground. Finally, 8'28'' consists of a single shot without beginning or end. The animated film shows the connections between violence, machines, technology and labour, mixing Western and Eastern mythologies.
Made in Germany 3– Migration
This compilation, the third part of our series with the best German short films of the last ten years, deals with the living conditions of migrants in Germany today. In 1984 six Turkish citizens died in Duisburg-Wanheimerort in an arson attack. While the police quickly ruled out a racist background, from today's point of view there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to prove it. Dunkelfeld goes in search of clues and reopens the case. In the animation Brand, an East German mayor and his family are met with a wave of hatred when he agrees to take in refugees. The essay film ma nouvelle vie européenne reflects on Europe's invisible borders from the perspective of Abou, a Malian refugee in Germany, making the camera a medium of self-empowerment.
In Three Notes, Jeannette Gaussi artistically processes the few remaining photographs of her Afghan childhood. The playful Moruk shows the introverted Hakan and the fun-loving Murat hanging out in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood. They meet daily, smoke pot, dream, philosophize and argue. Tiefenschärfe finally reads in the markings of the places in Nuremberg where the so-called NSU committed three murders. Here the pen becomes the camera and the camera becomes the actor while the film traces the unsettling impact of these attacks on society.
Children's cinema distribution programme 2021: Finding Ways
A programme for children from the age of three. Here, the smallest viewers see the world, which often seems so big and confusing, reflected in a playful way. The protagonists of the films have to find their own solutions to everyday obstacles, overcome fears and learn new things.
We take a cinematic journey to five-year-old Junu in Nepal, cheer canary Kiki on her way to freedom and while fishing with a little cat, we find out that friends make life more beautiful. A music video explores the jungle in gaudy tones. With each of the five films, the audience's eyes and ears are encouraged to open - to the quiet and loud moments of this programme, which is ideal for a first film and cinema experience.
Children's and Youth Film
We also have both individual films and ready-made programmes for hire that are suiteable for children and young people. Here you will find some links to ready-made programmes. You are also welcome to let us put together an indivdual programme for you. Please contact us with any questions you may have.
Making discoveries
Here, we experience childhood as a time of experiment, exuberant fantasy and pleasure, a time when we gather experiences and get to know ourselves better. But childhood is also a time when taking decisions is an act fraught with obstacles and hindrances that are not always unconnected with serious issues and sad experiences.
This programme invites children and adults to go on a journey through this diversity. It tells of a lethargic summer afternoon or the loss of a loved one, of climate change or the exciting feeling when one overcomes fear to soar to new heights. A programme for children of 8 and over in which several young people set out to make fresh discoveries.
Doing the right thing
A multi-faceted programme that highlights a phase in life when you are clearly still a child, but old enough to be confronted with choices and problems. A programme full of remarkable young people on their way to adulthood.
Available only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as DCP, Blu-Ray and DVD.
Stories without words
Without words but with clear messages, the programme convinces with its variety of topics - be it family or friendship. Exciting and instructive, it is ideal for a teaching unit and is also easy to understand for viewers with little or no knowledge of the German language.
Made in Germany
Film Search
Here you can browse our distribution stock from 2000 to the present, create film lists and place orders. If you are interested in older titles, please comtact us. For more information, see "Distribution programme" and "Terms and Conditions".