When you take a trip to Hof, it feels like travelling back in time to some other world. Hof used to be located in the so-called border zone, with the GDR to the north and Czechoslovakia to the east. The region received special funding, which was discontinued after reunification, causing the city to suffer economically. Today, Hof is located in the middle of Germany, but it still feels like you're somewhere on the edge of the world. The poor train connections contribute to this feeling.
Once you arrive, you are surprised by the unique charm of the place. The film festival is a cultural highlight every year in Hof. The weather at the end of October is not very inviting, but the atmosphere is friendly and familiar. The soft Franconian accent does the rest. The "Wärschtlamo" (sausage man) in front of the Central cinema offers Franconian bratwurst ‘2 im Weggla’ (2 in a roll). This year's film festival (21-26 October 2025) almost didn't happen when the second cinema pulled out at short notice. A few weeks before the opening, the organisers found last-minute replacement venues, including a gym and the Haus der Musik (House of Music).
Highlights of the programme were a series of documentaries that left a strong impression. First and foremost was The Last Ambassador by Natalie Halla (Austria 2025). The Viennese filmmaker portrays Manizha Bakhtari, the last Afghan ambassador to Austria. After the Taliban took power, she was officially dismissed by the new rulers, but she refused to vacate her post. She moved with a small team to modest quarters, where they continued to carry out consular functions. This, together with donations from the Afghan diaspora, enabled her to finance her work. We see how Manizha Bakhtari continues to represent her country before the UN bodies in Vienna, how she organises a conference of the Afghan resistance and founds a foundation that supports women and girls in Afghanistan. In between, the author intercuts images of the chaos following the Taliban's conquest of Kabul. We also see women protesting against the Islamist regime, which denies girls and women access to school and university and does everything it can to keep them locked up at home.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have pushed Afghanistan out of the headlines, but The Last Ambassador draws attention to a courageous diplomat who is not prepared to accept this.
The protagonists of Florian Hoffmann's documentary Die Unverzichtbaren (The Indispensables, Germany 2025) do not appear in the news either. They are people who do strenuous and indispensable jobs but remain in the shadows. People like Güven Ciftci, who works for a cleaning company and has to get up at 4 a.m., or Cynthia Würpel, who takes her two children to school and kindergarten before going to work as a mobile caregiver for the elderly and sick. Or the parcel driver at DHL, Khaleel Al Bodach, who comes from Iraq and says that in his home country there is no one who delivers the mail. What the three protagonists have in common is their conviction that it is important to work in order to participate in social life. What they wish for is more recognition for their work, not to mention a better salary.
The filmmaker Florian Hoffmann succeeds in creating an atmosphere in which they can express themselves openly without fear. It is impressive how honestly and eloquently the three protagonists talk about their lives and the challenges they face. The hardest part was getting the employers' consent, says Florian Hoffmann. On the first day of filming, a company employee was sent along to make sure that nothing critical was said. Soon, the supervisors no longer felt like getting up at 4 a.m. Only then did the protagonists feel free enough to speak uncensored. The Indispensables are people who make sure that our everyday lives run smoothly while remaining invisible. The film’s remarkable achievement is to make them visible in a compassionate way.
The Swiss film Architektur des Glücks (Architecture of Happiness) by Anton von Bredow and Michele Cirigliano reveals a strange dark side of capitalism. They tell the story of Campione, a fishing village on the shores of Lake Lugano, which was renamed Campione d'Italia by Mussolini in 1933. A casino had already been opened here in 1917 in the hope of eliciting military secrets from foreign diplomats in a relaxed atmosphere on ‘neutral territory’. Later, the Campione casino became a meeting place of glamour and luxury, from which the municipality, as the owner of the casino, also benefited. In the 2000s, the old casino with its 1920s charm was demolished and a new one was built by the famous Ticino architect Mario Botta. In 2007, it opened as the largest casino in Europe, a gigantic cube that looks as if an oversized UFO has landed in the middle of the village.
But in 2018, the bubbling source of money came to an abrupt end. The casino was too big and had not enough visitors. Overnight, it went bankrupt, and so did the community. Hundreds of croupiers and other employees lost their jobs. Even Swiss services such as waste disposal and sewage treatment could no longer be paid for. More and more people moved away, and Campione became a luxury ruin. The filmmakers let a wide variety of villagers tell their stories, including former croupiers, the priest, a lawyer of Turkish origin and a Russian estate agent. The film ends with the casino reopening in January 2022 with a reduced staff.
Mario Botta's building seems like a metaphor in stone for the belief in the infinite multiplication of money and wealth, a perpetual motion machine of financial fortune. No wonder the priest is reminded of the biblical parable of the Tower of Babel when he looks at the monumental casino.
The Hof Film Festival is now in its 58th year and has become a signature event for the city, which is why Hof likes to call itself the “Home of Films”, a phrase said to have originated with Wim Wenders. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Munich film scene came to Hof because they had nowhere else to show their films. As a nostalgic reminder, this year there was a 35mm screening of Fassbinder's early work Götter der Pest (Gods of the Plague, 1970), a crude black-and-white story of small-time gangsters and evil policemen with dialogue reminiscent of school theatre and cinematic borrowings from American and French gangster films à la Jean Pierre Melville. The leading actor, Harry Bär, came to Hof as a guest of honour. He worked with Fassbinder for many years and today comes across as a friendly 78-year-old gentleman.
The film festival thus has the feel of a veterans' reunion. In the evening after the last screening, people sit in the Hotel Strauß with wine and beer and reminisce about the old days when Wim (Wenders) and Rainer (Werner Fassbinder) regularly came to Hof, when Werner (Herzog) and later Christoph (Schlingensief) were regulars here. Meanwhile, there are other festivals such as Munich or the Max Ophüls Prize in Saarbrücken, which increasingly show German films. The Berlinale is also now more open to young filmmakers from Germany. Despite the odds, Hof manages to hold its own in the festival landscape and also attract a local audience. The film festival has retained its Upper Franconian charm, which is something you wouldn't want to miss at the end of the festival season.