Press Release Prize Winners    PK02 25/10/08

6th International Tegernsee Mountain Film Festival

A Great Prize for Great Cinema

The very opening film of the 6th Tegernsee International Mountain Film Festival made it: director Philipp Stölzl’s seven-million-Euro production ‘Nordwand’ did not only inspire its audience, but also the jury. Further prizes were awarded to productions from Austria, France, Serbia and Switzerland.

Last year’s festival showed that premature praise and aggressive marketing do not impress the Tegernsee festival jury one bit – as unknown Canadian mavericks snatched the main prize whereas the assumed favourite ‘Am Limit’ went home empty-handed. This meant that during the current festival, people wondered until the very end whether ‘Nordwand’ would suffer the same fate. Viewers certainly responded strongly to the movie on Wednesday’s opening night. With great trepidation and in a packed theatre did they witness the tragic summit attempt at the Eiger’s North Face. The dramatic, yet futile struggle for survival of Toni Kurz (played by Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (played Florian Lukas) went under everybody’s skin.

In this instance, viewers were of the same opinion as the highly competent international jury consisting of Françoise Guais (France), Alessandro Anderloni (Italy), Nico Mailänder (Germany) and Philipp Clarin (Germany). Over the last couple of days, this team of specialists watched, analysed and evaluated the 70 films accepted to the competition very carefully. Finally it was pronounced that Philipp Stölzl was to take 2008’s Great Prize of the City of Tegernsee home: ‘“North Face” describes the dramatic events surrounding the 1936 summit attempt at the Eiger North Face without ever glorifying them. The film achieves this in a way that is accessible for a larger audience, but also credible for the discerning expert,’ explains Philipp Clarin, speaker of the jury. ‘The fictitious background plot does not distract from the documentary quality of the film in any way.’ But there is another dimension as well: ‘a realistic portrayal of the political entanglement of German and Austrian mountaineering and its instrumentalisation by the Nazi regime.’

A more recent mountain drama provided source material for ‘Grab in eisigen Höhen’ (Tomb in the Ice) by director Karsten Scheuren, who won the German Alpine Club’s Prize for the best reasonable Alpine Film (category ‘Mountain Experience’). The documentary deals with the recovery of Markus Kronthaler’s body after a fatal accident at Broad Peak (8041 m) in 2006. ‘The jury does not seek to pronounce any judgment on how such a recovery effort and its filming may be,’ Philipp Clarin points out, ‘but the result certainly is very much worth seeing.’ He goes on to state that honesty, empathy and respect distinguish this film and its documentation of a recovery act previously deemed impossible due to extreme heights.

Highly impressive images made the production ‘Prinz der Alpen’ (Prince of the Alps) stand out, and it won the award in the category ‘Mountain Nature’. Austrians Klaus Feichtenberger and Otmar Penker accompany a fawn through the High Alps during its first year of life. ‘A documentary which represents an important impulse in the genre of alpine wildlife features,’ is the jury’s verdict. Lucian Muntean and Nataša Stankovic from Serbia succeeded in the category ‘Mountain Life’: their documentary ‘Journey of a Red Fridge’ was shot in Nepal and is a warm-hearted and humorous account of a young student who is forced to make his living as a mountain porter.

The ‘Extra Category’ was introduced last year and in this year’s festival ran under the motto ‘Film Portrait – People on the Mountain’. Here, even older films qualify for the competition. French director Rémy Tezier won over the jury with his moving portrait of Catherine Destivelle, one of the world’s greatest female alpinists. ‘Au delà des cimes’ (Beyond the Peaks) does not show her as former ‘superwoman’, but as a mountain climber who has found her path in life. ‘Gripping action shots in the Mont Blanc Massif are interspersed with intimate and greatly personal interviews,’ Philipp Clarin describes the film. ‘An impressive story ensues, inviting viewers to discover the mountains for themselves, to find their own path.’