TeleVISIONEN with new head
12 March 2024
Director, author and curator Bettina Schoeller Bouju will join the programme team in mid-March, heading the TV section TELEVISIONEN. She succeeds Friedemann Beyer, responsible for the section for over ten years.
“I am very pleased to be lending a new face to FILMFEST HAMBURG’s well-established TV section, starting this year. For me, the section is a great platform to show a wide range of what television can be on the big screen. We are inviting audiences and the industry to leave the comfort zone TV ratings behind this autumn and get involved in curated, innovative, courageous and unusual stories. From Hamburg as a powerful TV hub – with first-class studios, many creatives and wonderful settings – we want to rethink television in dialogue with the national and international TV industry,” says Bettina Schoeller Bouju.
“We warmly welcome Bettina Schoeller Bouju to our team and we’re looking forward to important impulses for an innovative and visionary TV section at FILMFEST HAMBURG. The television market is in a state of transformation, user behaviours are changing rapidly and new technologies are already being established. We want to take these developments into account and take a new stand with TELEVISIONEN. As a specialist and industry expert, Bettina Schoeller Bouju is very well connected and will use her expertise to drive this repositioning forward. My thanks go to her predecessor Friedemann Beyer, who has continuously developed the TV section under the festival direction of Albert Wiederspiel since 2012,” says FILMFEST HAMBURG director Malika Rabahallah.
Bettina Schoeller Bouju grew up in Frankfurt am Main as the daughter of literary critic and editor Wilfried F. Schoeller and was already interested in the question of how to make quality television at an early stage of her career. After completing a master’s degree in German studies, ethnology and journalism at the University of Hamburg and a film degree at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, she studied film directing for a year at the Bucharest Film Academy in Romania. Since 2001 she has been working as a director and author of both feature films and documentaries for cinema and TV. She is a published writer, has worked for Deutschlandfunk and has curated DVDs, film series and exhibitions. Bettina Schoeller Bouju is co-founder of the association Pro Quote Regie and has established the RegieSalon at Babylon Kino Berlin with regular film talks.
The TV section at FILMFEST HAMBURG has been running since 1995, initially under the name “TV Movies made in Hamburg”, then under the title “16:9 – Fernsehen im Kino”. Since 2017, the section has been called “Televisionen”. The participating films and series in the competition compete for the Hamburg Producer Awards for German TV Productions, which has been awarded since 2014 and is endowed with 25,000 euros, as well as for the Special Award for Serial Formats, which has been awarded since 2021 and is endowed with 10,000 euros. Both prizes are sponsored by the VFF – Verwertungsgesellschaft für Film- und Fernsehproduzenten.
Photo: Janine Guldener
