Blog: Film festivals

The LICHTER Film Festival Frankfurt International is a celebration of and for film. Carried by a high-quality regional as well as international programme, it shines a light on the facets of film art that too often miss out in the everyday of cinema and television.


LICHTER was born from the local film scene. Founded in 2008 by a group of filmmakers and film fans, it has developed from an event for a few from a pledged community in a homemade cinema housed in a studio to an integral part of the (supra-)regional culture. The success proves the creators right. In 2017, LICHTER celebrated its 10th anniversary and proved once more how big the region’s need is to bring them, the audience, the creatives and guests from all over the world together.

The festival programme doesn’t just want to entertain. Every year, the curators make efforts in combining cinema and discourse. In addition to the regional short- and long film competitions, which give a space to the diverse filmmaking of the region, the international programme focuses on a theme that changes yearly. This theme captivates for more reasons than just its topicality, it also points toward socio-political questions to follow and continue debates outside of the film theatre. LICHTER already took on the themes “City”, “Revolution”, “Humour”, “Money”, “Truth”, “Chaos” and “Nature”. This year, the 13th edition of the festival revolves all around “Power”.

At the Intersection of Film and Other Artistic Disciplines
Following this, it seems even more important to search for and support intersections with other cultural institutions and artistic disciplines. The bridge between film, artistic means of expression and social dialogue makes LICHTER unique within German film festivals. Notable partners like the German Film museum or our partner cinema Mal Seh’n are not just venues, institutions such as the Cluster of Excellence Normative Orders of the Goethe University especially add to the content-related design of the extensive accompanying programme: In numerous workshops and discussions, we question the socio-political explosive force of the yearly theme in a number of different ways. Meanwhile, the LICHTER ART AWARD, launched in 2010, focuses closely on the field of video art and its current developments and directions on regional and international levels, while last-but-not-least the VR Storytelling Competition, first launched in 2017, dedicates itself to the varieties of alternative realities.