Preparations for our jubilee festival – 25 years of exground filmfest – were not exactly easy. The threat of budget cuts in the upcoming years from the side of the State Capital of Wiesbaden and the ongoing quarrels around the reform of Hessian Film Fund into a Hessen Film and Media Ltd. have taken lots of energy. To organize a festival, renowned as exground filmfest, each year in unpaid work is quite enough of self exploitation, which we are willing to take for the sake of the cause.
All year long we also had to fight in working groups and organizations, together with many other cultural projects in Wiesbaden and festivals in Hesse, to be noticed by politicians in Wiesbaden and Hesse at all. We call upon those responsible in the city, to not cut the budget for culture, but on the contrary, raise the far too low spendings adequately and thus recognize the work of cultural projects and create planning reliability. We call upon the politicians responsible in our state to not cut spendings for film festivals, enable a reliable planning in medium-term, and not dispose of the festival financing under the smoke screen of a Hessen Film and Media Ltd. One thing is for sure: without the financial support of city and state there would be no exground filmfest anymore! As Richard von Weizsäcker put it brilliantly: "As culture is no luxury, which we can either afford or do away with, but the mental ground, securing our actual inner survivability." (quote from his accepting speech of the memorandum "Culture in Berlin" on September 11, 1991)
For the new festival edition we compiled, against all odds, a multi-faceted program for you with more than 250 international productions – a cross section of the 2014/2015er vintage of international cinema from more than 3,000 entered short and feature-length films as well as the best from several other festivals we visited. It would be the best possible compliment for our unpaid work, if you joined us in masses on our filmic journey around the world. Lean back and relax in the fitting chairs of Caligari FilmBühne and Murnau Filmtheater, or come to iconic Kulturpalast, let yourself be taken in other worlds and cultures, and experience the audience hits of other festivals and use the opportunity to talk to the more than 100 expected film guests about their works.
In order to master the Herculean task of exground filmfest, we need external staff, interns and more than 100 helping hands during the festival. Our heartfelt thanks go to all those, who helped with their work to make exground filmfest 28 possible.
This also goes for all patrons, sponsors, partners and friends of the festival, without whose financial support we wouldn’t be able to pay the film rents and the tickets for our international film guests and also cover many other costs like our advertising material.
