About the festival

Many soccer films also offer the opportunity for follow-up communication and intercultural dialog: Talking about the sport, exchanging specialist knowledge and footballing opinions across social boundaries, also provides the most diverse viewers with an unproblematic form of communicative intercourse.

Football speaks the same language all over the world – and therefore enables cinematic access to problems and ways of life, and is therefore also a basis for intercultural learning. Football is much more than a game – football in film is a wonderful way to bring culture into play.

Jan Tilman Schwab, author of “Football in Film” – Lexicon of Football Film
Birger Schmidt, Festival Director 11mm – the International Football Film Festival

As Europe’s largest and oldest football film festival, 11mm has been combining cinema and football in Berlin for 21 years. The five-day festival shows outstanding feature films, documentaries and short films from all over the world and sees football as a mirror of social realities: political, emotional, contradictory. Between major tournaments and local stories, fan culture and power structures, pop and poetry, a diverse program of films, events and discussions with filmmakers, protagonists and guests from the worlds of sport, culture and cinema is created every year.

11mm is both a meeting place and a space for discourse – for filmmakers, soccer fans, cinema lovers and the curious. Competitions, rediscoveries, talks and educational formats open up new perspectives on the global phenomenon of a game. Football is not only celebrated or discussed here, but challenged: as a cultural practice, as a mirror of our present, as material for great cinema.