Berlin Independent Film Festival

Such a wonderful festival! Zoe Greenbaum’s film, We Are Bleach won the Festival Director’s choice for Best Short (always lovely!), and we met amazing filmmakers and amazing audience members for whom Bleach was revelatory. Fantastically, and so intelligently, the festival ran parallel to the Berlinale. How fortunate to see fantastic films in two festivals at the same time! Big thank you to Berlin Independent for including us!

The BIFF team looked after us really well and we are over the moon that our documentary, "The Session Man", took home the Best Low Budget Feature Award! And Babylon Berlin is the coolest venue!

Even though I took home an award I left with mixed feelings. The quality of some selected short films were actually super bad and still they took home an award as well. The venue is beautiful from the outside but the films were screened in cinema 2 and 3, super tiny rooms that you enter through the back door and that have neither charme nor quality.
The communication by email was okay, I got all informations I needed. The organization of the event itself felt pretty improvised.
What I was a bit disappointed was the way the awards were announced, not solemnly at all.
There was some networking event in the beginning but no more.
So all in all I would say this is a festival for no budget films and first or second time / semi-professional filmmakers. It's nice to watch your film on a screen with a little audience and if you wanna put some laurel onto your film poster or tell your friends that you won an award you should submit your film. Otherwise save your money.

Thank you so much to the Berlin independent film festival for honoring us with the jury award for best shot. Thank you Natasha for keeping the communication open and keeping us informed in everything as we were not able to attend for reasons you already know. This has been an amazing experience to be a part of this great festival. Can't wait to finish our next project and once again participate.

Thank you to the festival for inviting us and showing our film "Divorce Day". It was a lot of fun and it was great to see our movie again on the big screen.