With its ‘Filmmaker in Focus’ programme, FILMFEST HAMBURG highlights the work of two outstanding filmmakers who have had a significant impact on world cinema: This year’s guests are French director and Golden Palm winner Julia Ducournau and multi-award-winning Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who will be presenting their latest films, Alpha and The Secret Agent. Earlier works by both filmmakers and extensive film talks about their work will round off the format, which was introduced in 2019. 
  
“With Julia Ducournau and Kleber Mendonça Filho, we are shining a light on two visionary directors whose works are as distinctive as they are uncompromising. Taking completely different paths – in their choice of genres as well as their cinematic styles – they create films that get under your skin. We are very much looking forward to welcoming both of them to FILMFEST HAMBURG. They are among the most influential voices in contemporary international cinema and share a deep belief in the transformative power of cinema,” says FILMFEST HAMBURG programme director Kathrin Kohlstedde.

 

Julia Ducournau – Cinema at the boundaries of bodies

 

Julia Ducournau is at the peak of her era – modern, radical, visually stunning. Her films are uncompromising and at the same time deeply human. The director, who grew up in Paris, rejects stereotypical thinking, including on gender issues, and defines herself first and foremost as a human being. Consciously turning away from the male gaze, she questions existing binary orders and structures. Her intimate body horror works revolve around adolescent fantasies, sexual awakening and gender discourses. Her often lonely characters suffer, act extremely, cruelly, unpredictably – and are capable of both hatred and love. In order to find themselves, they must feel their bodies, whatever the cost.

 

In Raw (2016), Ducournau tells the story of a talented veterinary student who, as a vegetarian, is forced to eat raw meat during an initiation ritual. The experience awakens an insatiable desire for meat in her and confronts her with the darkest sides of her desire.

 

With Titane (2021), winner of the Palme d’Or, Ducournau goes one step further. She radically breaks with the binary gender system, opens herself up to the fantastical and tells the story of the androgynous serial killer Alexia. Since a car accident left her with a titanium plate in her head, Alexia has developed a fetish for machines, becomes pregnant by a car and, while fleeing from the police, assumes the identity of a firefighter’s missing son. This film is also a painful, uncompromising transformation, ‘a new reality in which the monstrous becomes a strength. For me, this is clearly an optimistic vision’, says the director.

 

Four years later, Ducournau returns to the Cannes competition with Alpha (2025) – and surprises with a more restrained but equally haunting visual language. The drama is set in 1980s France: 13-year-old Alpha lives alone with her mother, a doctor, in Le Havre. When a rumour spreads that she has contracted a mysterious disease, her everyday life takes a threatening turn. The virus, which gradually transforms people into marble statues, becomes an allegorical reflection of the AIDS epidemic and reveals the disintegration of a family. Less explicit than in Raw and Titane, but no less intense, Ducournau combines coming-of-age motifs, body horror and dark contemporary history in Alpha, which is celebrating its German premiere at FILMFEST HAMBURG.

 

Kleber Mendonça Filho – Cinema as a political seismograph

 

His films defy categorisation and are always good for a surprise. Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho tirelessly explores his homeland – life under capitalism, global political developments and a resurgent, toxic colonialism. The graduate journalist and former film critic is a keen observer. He takes his time with his screenplays and seeks connections between the private and the social in cinema.

 

In his feature film debut Neighbouring Sounds (2012), he painted a precise portrait of the Brazilian middle class in Recife. Between high-rise buildings and old apartment blocks, he creates an atmosphere of latent threat in which everyday noises — from barking dogs to construction noise — make social tensions audible. The film won the FIPRESCI Prize in Rotterdam and brought Mendonça Filho international recognition.

 

In Bacurau (2019), co-directed with Juliano Dornelles and awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes, a colourful village community in the near future fights back against corrupt politicians. The politicians cut off the water supply, wipe the village off the map and allow Western tourists to hunt down the inhabitants in a deadly chase – especially those who do not conform to white heteronormativity. The cross-genre political allegory combines western, mystery thriller and science fiction.

 

The Secret Agent (2025) shows that he has not lost his faith in cinema and the power of community. The thriller about the military junta’s reign of terror in Recife in the 1970s is also a colourful homage to the resilience of the collective. Mendonça Filho received the award for Best Director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his elegant direction, while Wagner Moura was honoured as Best Actor. The film will celebrate its German premiere at FILMFEST HAMBURG before being released in German cinemas on 6 November.

 

FILMFEST HAMBURG will take place from 25 September to 4 October 2025. More than 120 productions from around the world will be shown as world, European, German or Hamburg premieres. The festival cinemas are Abaton, CinemaxX Dammtor, Metropolis, Passage and Studio Kino. On 3 October, FILMFEST HAMBURG will celebrate the ‘Free Admission Day’. All festival films showing in the five festival cinemas on this day will be free of charge. The FILMFEST UMS ECK cinemas will also participate in the event with one free film screening each on 3 October 2025. The complete festival programme will be announced on 9 September 2025.