72nd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 28 April – 3 May 2026

Facing the catastrophes of this world

The 2026 Oberhausen competitions

The competition line-up of the 72nd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is complete. In five competitions, the festival will present a total of 121 films and music videos from 48 countries, selected from a record number of over 7,600 submissions from 124 countries. Documentary and hybrid forms predominate in all competitions, even the MuVi Award features three documentary music videos. Filmmakers from Sri Lanka to Canada are finding a variety of ways to address personal and political crises, trauma or exile – and searching for filmic ways to cope with them. The 72nd Oberhausen festival will award a total of almost 45,000 euros in prize money in all competitions.

“As we are always seeking out new voices and visual languages in our competitions, we are particularly pleased that in both the International and the German Competition we have discovered an exceptional number of new and promising filmmakers this year. These are works that surprised us, whose quality is unmissable – and that shine out in their complexity,” comments Madeleine Bernstorff, artistic director of the festival.

The International Competition

Fifty films from 36 countries were selected for the International Competition, the largest and oldest section in Oberhausen, 28 of which will be shown as world premieres. They range from abstract experimental to classic feature films. A theme that runs through many of the films is migration and exile – from the decade-long struggle of an immigrant family to obtain US citizenship (Prayer for All Simple Things, Diego Rojas, Canada) to the virtual return of a young refugee from Ukraine to his home – via robot dog (Vydkrytyi svit, Homecoming, Roman Khimei/Yarema Malashchuk, Ukraine).

What cinematic means are there to process trauma? The competition entries are using a variety of formal approaches to find answers to this question, whether they deal with the genocide in Rwanda (TEÊMBA!, FLOW!, Kagoma Ya Twairwa, Rwanda), the disappearance of Tamils in Sri Lanka (A Flower Falling Back into the Earth, Rajee Samarasinghe, Sri Lanka) or an attempt to come to terms with the death of a family member in a plane crash (an open field, Teboho Edkins, D/F/South Africa).

The German Competition

Seventeen films were selected for the German Competition, twelve of which will be screened as world premieres. Around 1,200 submissions were previewed. Here, migration is not only the subject of many productions; more than half of the filmmakers in this competition come from international background. Knockout Dreams (Andreas Birkenheier) and Catacombs (Shehab Fatoum), for example, look at the life of migrants in Germany today from very different perspectives – as a documentary about a boxing club whose members are predominantly young migrants, or as the poetic exploration of a war-torn country in fragments and memories. Ein neues Wort (A New Word, Cana Bilir-Meier), on the other hand, takes up a campaign by German broadcaster WDR from 1970, when an alternative term for “Gastarbeiter” (guest worker) was to be found.

The invasion of Ukraine is also reflected in German short films: In How Do You Spell This Word (Yulia Lokshina), for example, the story of a Russian teacher denounced by her students for making critical remarks, who re-enacts her story with students in Germany. Or in Movchat‘ Ptakhy (The Birds are Silent, Leo Dzhyshyashvili), which documents an ordinary evening between three friends just before the Russian invasion of 2022, in whose conversations the war is already foreshadowed.

The NRW Competition

More than 260 productions from North Rhine-Westphalia were submitted for this competition, nine films were selected. With films from Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Wuppertal or Mülheim/Ruhr, North Rhine-Westphalia as a whole is making its mark as a major film production hub. Three of the works come from the Cologne Academy of Media Arts. NRW as a location can be found in the feature film Beneath the Night (Maximilian Karakatsanis), where a Cologne subway driver is troubled by the fact that he has become the face of an advertising campaign. In Borderland, the duo Gavois Klöfkorn set out on a trip through NRW to fill the giant holes left by opencast mining with water or chase AI-generated wild pigs across football pitches. Other films travel to Kyrgyzstan (Eine Tochter und zehn Söhne, A Daughter and Ten Sons, Paula Milena Weise/Finn Ole Weigt), Japan (Kamogawa, Rainer Komers), Anatolia (Kenger, Irfan Akcadag), to France (KU YENDZA – TRAJECTORIES, Simon Rittmeier) or into the glittering object world of an adolescent pole dancer (Garden of Edie, Miri Klischat). The thematic range extends from the artistic crisis of a filmmaker in view of the catastrophic state of the world (Hope Road, Susann Maria Hempel) to a tribute to Kenneth Anger in KOMMUNIST KAR KOMMANDOS (Markus Mischkowski/Christos Dassios), in which an old GDR car plays a central role.

49th Children’s and Youth Film Competition

In this section, Oberhausen will present 34 films from 21 countries this year, screened by age groups starting with three and selected from around 800 international submissions. Productions from Latin America are particularly well-represented this year, with El Mandado (The Favour, Ingrid Paola Bonilla Rodriguez, Colombia), América (Javier Arias-Stella, Peru), El Paraíso de Ainara (Ainara‘s Paradise, Esther Niemeier/Laura Espinel, D/Colombia), Ilhuícatl Nextli (Heavenly Dream, José Ángel Tomasis Briseño, Mexico) or Niña Chilapa (Juana Lotero López, Colombia). Feature films and documentaries predominate, but there are also experimental works for the youngest audiences with Jésus Marie Joseph (Patxi Meerman, France) or for kids age 12 and over with niǎo, fēi xíng zhōng (In the Valley, Han Loong Lim, Malaysia). The films cover a spectrum from fantastic animations for very young audiences to images of children’s lives in Colombia, Nepal or Peru, to breaking out of traditional structures or a teenage pregnancy in the programme for kids age 16 and over.

28th MuVi Award for the Best German Music Video

This year, Oberhausen has selected eleven music videos as candidates for the MuVi Award from over 200 submissions. Documentary music videos are unusually well-represented with Everybody (A 21 Years Later Video Edit) by Stefan Lampadius for Egoexpress, Rentrer à la maison (Timo Schierhorn/Uwe) for Anadol & Marie Klock and No More Roses (Graw Böckler) for Donna Regina. Strong women dominate as protagonists, from Peaches in No Lube so Rude (Matt Lambert) via ildikó in All Glock No Cock (Olga Ringleb/Paula Kiermaier) to Chilean women protesters on 8 March in No More Roses.

All nominated clips will be available for online viewing and to vote for the MuVi Audience Award from 2 April on www.muvipreis.de and the websites of the MuVi partners 3sat, Byte.FM, Kaput.Mag and Kultur.West.

The complete list of all competition films is online here.

Still from selected competition films are available on request at the Oberhausen press office or for download here. 

Accreditation for the 72nd festival here.

Accreditation deadline: 24 April 2026

Oberhausen, 18 March 2026

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, T +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de