Heinz Badewitz - Director of the Hof International Film Festival

Like most people at the time, Heinz Badewitz – who was born in Hof - came to filmmaking in a roundabout way: equipped with his father’s 8mm-camera, he set out to make films not cast in the usual mould of ‘home movies’. However, he first trained as a technical draughtsman – and on the side gigging as a jazz drummer – until, in 1963, he went to Munich to fulfill his dreams and become a cameraman. He first worked at the print lab of Bavaria Atelier GmbH und then studied at the Deutsche Institut für Film und Fernsehen, the precursor of today’s HFF Munich. As of 1965, he worked as camera assistant and animation cameraman with Wolfgang Urchs.

Making shorts – seven in all - he was invited to Oberhausen und Montreal, among other festivals. When Heinz Badewitz and some other – then unknown – colleagues in 1967 screened their first shorts in the Regina Cinema in Hof, he inadvertedly ‘founded’ the Hof Film Festival.