Hof International Film Festival

Hof International Film Festival
South African film maker Michael Oblowitz at the "Hof International Film Festival" on 26 October 2013
Status	Active
Genre	Film festival
Frequency	Annually
Location(s)	Hof
Country	Germany
Inaugurated	1967 (1967)
Founder	Heinz Badewitz
Participants	130
Attendance	28000

The Hof International Film Festival is a German film festival that takes place annually in late October. The focus is on German language films complemented by a few foreign language productions. The festival is located in the northeastern corner of the German state of Bavaria, in the small town of Hof.

Newcomer directors and producers get to premiere their debut motion pictures in Hof. Every year one film director is honoured with a retrospective of their work. Directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Peter Jackson, Jim Jarmusch, Amos Kollek, Mike Leigh, Ulrich Seidel, Tom Tykwer, Wim Wenders, Sönke Wortmann and Maren Ade have attended the festival in the past. Most major German media cover the festival every year.

Usually 130 movies are shown from Tuesday to Sunday. In 2014 the Festival had about 28000 visitors.

In 1967 Heinz Badewitz and two fellow film students organized a three hours movie theater night in Hof showing a few motion pictures. They called this event the 1st Hof Short Film Festival, having developed the idea after disappointing output at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. In Munich, where they studied at the time, cinema rentals had been too expensive to start a project of that kind. This event grew over the years to become Hof International Film Festival, also receiving international attention. Badewitz led the Festival from the beginning until his death in 2016. The 50th anniversary edition of the festival was curated in 2016 by Linda Söffker, Alfred Holighaus and Thorsten Schaumann. Since 2017, Schaumann has been the artistic director.

Hof International Film Festival is completed by a traditional soccer match – FC Film World vs. FC Hof International Film Festival. Every year a team of actors, directors and producers play against a team of eleven players from the festival organisation and festival supporters.