Seven-time Oscar nominees Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer at FilmFest Hamburg

Launched in 2025, Deep Dive shines a spotlight on key filmmaking departments and the artists working behind the camera. Following its successful launch with Oscar-winning sound designer Sylvain Bellemare and a screening of Arrival, this year’s edition welcomes Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer. Using Barbie as a case study, they will demonstrate how spaces, colours, furniture and props come together to create a distinctive cinematic world.

“With extraordinary precision, imagination and a remarkable sense of colour, Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer have created some of the most memorable cinematic worlds of recent decades. Barbie offers a particularly vivid example of the extent to which production design and set decoration shape a story. With Deep Dive, we are giving the creative departments behind the camera greater visibility and celebrating film as the result of many different art forms coming together,” says Kathrin Kohlstedde, Programme Director of FilmFest Hamburg.

Greenwood and Spencer are one of the most highly regarded creative teams in international cinema. Each of them has received seven Academy Award nominations. Their collaborations include Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Sherlock Holmes, Anna Karenina, Beauty and the Beast, Darkest Hour and Barbie. They received the BAFTA Award for Best Production Design for their work on Atonement.

Their collaboration began at the BBC and has since developed into a close creative partnership spanning more than two decades and numerous productions. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles is currently presenting a major exhibition dedicated to their work, entitled “Barbie to Anna Karenina: The Cinematic Worlds of Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer”.

At FilmFest Hamburg, the duo will explain their respective roles and explore how production design and set decoration work together, from the first visual concepts and the selection of materials and colour palettes to the final dressing of a set. Particular attention will be paid to the creation of Barbieland, a world whose shiny surfaces and apparent perfection play a central role in the film’s narrative. Following the panel, Barbie will be screened in the Dolby Cinema auditorium at KINOPOLIS.

FilmFest Hamburg takes place from 24 September to 3 October 2026, showing more than 120 national and international productions as world premieres, European, German or Hamburg premieres. Screenings take place at the cinemas Abaton, CinemaxX Dammtor, Metropolis, Passage and Studio Kino. On 3 October, the festival celebrates its Free Admission Day, with all FilmFest screenings at the five festival cinemas plus participating “FilmFest ums Eck” venues free to attend.