Documentary Film Prize for Portrait of an Architect

The film that received this year’s Goethe Documentary Film Prize is named Concrete Love. The prize goes to director Maurizius Staerkle-Drux, who the jury claims produced “a moving portrait of 94-year-old architect Gottfried Böhm and his family.” They went on to state, “the film tells a multi-layered tale of love, the passion for architecture and four generations of German history. With sensitive observations, intimate interviews and stirring filmic explorations of an extraordinary architectural legacy, the film creates a lasting impression of the buildings and the people.”

Every year, the Goethe-Institut awards the 2,000-euro prize to a special documentary at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. In addition to cinematic criteria, the film must refer to Germany while treating a universal topic that allows the film to be shown worldwide. The Goethe-Institut purchases the international license for the film, funds its subtitling in at least eight languages and shows the film in more than ninety countries.

This year’s jury under the chairs of directors Judith Keil and Antje Kruska, who received the prize in 2013 for their film Land in Sicht, included film experts from the Goethe-Institut: Joachim Bernauer (Film, Television, Radio division head) and Sharmistha Sarker (Goethe-Institut Kolkata) as well as Francois Venter (Goethe-Institut Johannesburg).

Two weeks ago, the Goethe-Institut awarded another film prize at the Schlingel Film Festival in Chemnitz. The Pasta Detectives by Neele Leana Vollmar received the Youth and Children’s Film Award. The movie is about an adventurous manhunt and the friendship between two boys in Berlin who could not be more different from one another.

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