Hof Gold-Prize goes to Karsten Dahlem for CRASH

The HOF GOLD PRIZE of the Friedrich Baur Foundation, awarded by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts In memory of Heinz Badewitz, was presented for the fifth time this year. It is the most highly-endowed German prize for up-and-coming filmmakers, awarded to directors for their first feature film produced in Germany and presented at Hof.

The award is endowed with a value of approx. € 35,000 in certified gold, together with one year of mentoring. This year, the mentoring duo M+M, Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia from Munich also took on the jury role. Along with the gold bar, the prize winners receive an art work, the “Heinz Badewitz Prize”, which is a luminous stele designed at Selb College of Design.

In 2022, the HOF GOLD PRIZE of the Friedrich Baur Foundation, awarded by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts In memory of Heinz Badewitz goes to director

Karsten Dahlem for his film CRASH

It was presented by Dr. Hans-Peter Friedrich, advisory council of the Friedrich Baur Foundation.

Jury statement

"CRASH is a darkly brilliant kaleidoscope of pain and displacement, constantly alternating between emotional explosions and implosions. After a serious accident, stunt driver Chrissi becomes wheelchair-bound and returns to her home village, where she, her father and her former friends are confronted inescapably with the traumatic past.

It is a radical subject with enormous pitfalls. Dahlem and his team embrace this narrative risk to the full, creating a film of extreme emotional density that is difficult for the audience to escape and at the same time hard to bear."

"This is only a success because all, absolutely all of the participants complement each other brilliantly. Together, the actors - particularly Anna Maria Mühe and Michael Wittenborn - develop a psychologically complex structure. Cinematography, editing and sound keep the film dense, inescapable and yet in a constant state of flux. The tense rhythm of silence and dialogue fuses the composition into an organic narrative image.

One senses that Karsten Dahlem is a director who can draw heavily from personal incisive experiences. He composes and choreographs these with frightening precision already in this first feature film and marks general interpersonal and social breaking points on a higher level."