Interview with Festival Director Sascha Keilholz
The International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg (IFFMH) celebrates the diversity of films from all over the world and often provides a platform for young filmmakers who turn out to be future stars. Some even recognise the festival as a springboard for filmmakers and regard it as an explorer.
For the past seven years now, the festival has been headed by Sascha Keilholz. A talk with him about this year’s edition, his team’s selection, the focus of his festival and his plans for next year’s anniversary.
Britta Schmeis: Sascha, this year’s motto is Feel Good. Why did you choose this – especially regarding the times we live in?
Sascha Keilholz: There are several reasons and several possible interpretations. There is this theory of escapism, which says that in films you delve into other worlds and realities in order to escape the crises of this world. But for us, as programmers, it’s more about the opposite. Films always lead me to myself. Because when I deal with the realities of other people’s lives that I would otherwise never come into contact with, I can develop new perspectives. That’s exactly what brings me back to myself.
Of course, there is more and more pressure on us as society: politically, economically and socio-politically. And the greater these challenges become, the more our perspective often narrows. I think that this year, we have again managed to select films that do not confirm our perspective, but broaden our view and perhaps sometimes even irritate us in a creative way. We don’t want to meet expectations, but surprise people. So we want to create feel-good moments on very different levels.
BS: The opening film Inside Amir was a very personal film that did not address politics, religion or other socio-political conflicts – and yet it was still political. Why this opening film?
SK: The film is set in Tehran and presents the city in a way that is not very often seen or shown. It just follows young people meeting, cooking, playing table tennis, riding bikes. But by this choice, to me, the film is very political even though it doesn’t show the totalitarian regime with all the repressive elements as we usually see it. On the surface it shows people who live there with all their everyday problems. But then there are all these little hints, that there is something wrong.
BS: A total of 16 films were shown in the On the Rise competition, ranging from a comedy from Canada to a Colombian chamber play to poetic films from Japan, China and Chile. What are your artistic criteria when making your selection?
SK: We want to cover the entire spectrum of international film. It’s about aesthetics, about filmmakers having a vision for how they tell their story audiovisually. In addition to the surprise effect, an individual approach is also important.
BS: There are other sections like Pushing the Boundaries, Filmscapes and Retrospective. How do you select these programs?
SK: Retrospective is always the easiest and at the same time the hardest section because it could have looked completely different. This year’s focus was on Snot and Tears – the Aesthetics of Grand Emotions in Melodrama. So we have shown very different films from Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson up to Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves and Yoshimira Kōzaburō’s Night River.
For the other sections, we try to take the section titles literally, for instance, Pushing the Boundaries. These films sometimes chose a very radical approach. Filmscapes really is like a landscape of international cinema from all over the world. From genre to animation, from fiction to documentary, short or long. Furthermore we offer a look at the films of directors after their first and second works. In this section, for example, there was Roofman by Derek Cianfrance. Derek was at our festival with his first film and so we’re trying to get the ball rolling and keep up with the directors’ careers.
BS: In 2019 you took over as director of the festival. What do you think you have changed? How did the festival develop?
SK: A filmmaker once said that we are the “most welcoming festival”. That means a lot to me. We are representing our communes and region as well as the film industry and we are living this welcoming culture. We are not an A-festival, but next to the Berlinale we are Germany’s most important international film festival. Our team is very ambitious, both professionally and personally. We try to show respect to everyone – to our audience and to all professionals who are involved in making a movie. So we invite all of them, if they are important to the film. I think this is kind of unique.
BS: Next year will be the 75th edition of the IFFMH. What are your plans?
SK: We want to reach even more people and connect the festival with other cultural and social areas. That’s why we plan a bigger campaign under the umbrella of the festival and the anniversary’s motto which I’m not going to reveal yet. But there will be a wide range of activities by partners like museums, the opera, the theatre, schools and social institutions at places where you usually don’t expect films. I am really looking forward to that and hope to create even more attention to culture in this region in general and to our festival in particular.
Britta Schmeis
©FIPRESCI 2025