International Award
The International Newcomer Award, the main award of the IFFMH, is endowed with 30,000 euros, donated by the Manfred Lautenschläger Foundation. With this award, the international jury honours the best directorial work of the respective year, recognizing what they consider to be the strongest work and the directorial talent that is evident in it.
The International Jury consists of three outstanding personalities from the international film industry, artists, designers and thinkers of cinema. These personalities change from year to year and are newly appointed by us for each season.
This is our International Jury 2023!
Goran Stolevski
Goran Stolevski emigrated from northern Macedonia to Australia as a teenager. In 2022, his feature film debut 'You Won't Be Alone' celebrated its world premiere in competition at Sundance. At the IFFMH he won the International Newcomer Award with it in the same year. In 2023, he is back in Mannheim-Heidelberg not only as a juror, but also with two films. Of an Age', his second film, will be shown in the FILMSCAPES section. This opener at the Melbourne Film Festival also won the CinefestOz Award for Best Australian Film. His third film 'Housekeeping for Beginners' is screening with us in PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES. He just received the Queer Lion Award in Venice.
Elisa Schlott
Berlin-based Elisa Schlott, born in 1994, played her first major cinema role as a teenager and received the prestigious Förderpreis Deutscher Film as best actress for 'Draußen am See' at the 2009 Munich Film Festival. In 2014 she went to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater 'Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy' in Leipzig. In parallel, she acted in theatre, and had an important leading role in the film 'Fremde Tochter'. Most recently, she appeared in the major series productions 'Das Boot' and 'Die Kaiserin' and in the cinema in 'Niemand ist bei den Kälbern' by Sabrina Sarabi (IFFMH 2021).
Denis Dercourt
Denis Dercourt is a director, screenwriter, university lecturer for film and also a musician. He grew up in Paris. His films such as 'Lise et André', 'The Girl Who Turns the Pages' and 'On Her Birthday' have been invited to many renowned international festivals and won awards there.
Last year, 'Vanishing' screened at the Busan festival. In addition, he was jury president of the section 'Perspektive Deutsches Kino' at the Berlinale. As a lecturer, he held a professorship at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg and the HEAR (Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin). Since 2015 he has been teaching creative writing and film directing at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.
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