What a day, what a beautiful day’ they sang on May 28th 1967 in Hof. However not because the city now had its own film festival. Much more so because the home team FC Bayern Hof was celebrating a step up in the national league with a 5:2 victory over Borussia Neunkirchen.

Hof 1967: a football town. Little wonder then that the Hof Film Festival to this day has a strong connection with football: no festival is complete without the traditional match between the film FC Hof Film Festival team (manned with German film professionals) and the so-called Hof Selection.

To be exact, the ‘First Hof Film Festival’ never actually existed. The event that took place at the Regina Filmtheater one Sunday morning in 1967 with some 100 cinemagoers in attendance was – according to the hand-painted posters – ‘the world’s smallest film festival’. Nine short films were shown, the shortest of which was 59 seconds, the longest lasting just about 20 minutes. Among the directors were Vlado Kristl, Uwe Brandner, and Heinz Badewitz, who organised the whole thing and premiered his own LEIDEN DES JUNGEN TRAUERBÖCK (‘Sorrows of young Trauerböck’).

While no one seriously thought about continuing the event, over a beer in Werner Weinelt’s bar ‘Bootshaus’ (whose ‘New Jazz Group’ is considered to be one of the original seeds of the festival) there was some wondering about what it might be like if the short film matinee developed into a ‘Hof Film Festival’. What clinched it were the West German Short Film Days the following year. When censorship was introduced to the renowned Oberhausen Festival, many directors protested by withdrawing their entries. Badewitz took advantage of the opportunity and invited colleagues to his hometown. The motto was: ‘Everyone wants to head off to the big city – we don’t.’

Since Hof is a beer town, too, the 2nd Hof International Film Festival – as it was already being called – kicked off with a tour of one of the then many local breweries. Afterwards, everyone sat together in the beer garden before the first film was screened in the Scala Kino: Vlado Kristl’s DER BRIEF (‘The letter’). It was a somewhat strange film, but there were others in the programme that could also be considered ‘underground’ back then. Werner Herzog and Werner Nekes, Adolf Winkelmann and George Moore presented their short films; the international side was represented by, among others, guests from Prague (one of whom declared the work of his western colleagues a ‘waste of material’), and Jean-Marie Straub’s CHRONIK DER ANNA MAGDALENA BACH (CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH) closed the event on Sunday afternoon.

For the festival’s third edition in 1969, the Cine-Center Hof (from then on the event’s organiser) went looking for support at the city hall. As the councillors debated, one of them made the unforgettable statement, ‘All of these things contribute to the downfall of our culture, and every single Mark spent would be wasted.’ One thousand Marks, half the sum requested, however, were deemed a reasonable enough investment.

The 3rd annual festival took place for the first time at the Central Theater – where it was to remain. The cinema, Hof’s largest, accommodated 900 seats back then. Not until 1976, just in time for the festival’s 10 year anniversary celebration, was the cinema divided into three and later, bit by bit, expanded to six venues. Amazingly, the largest cinema was occasionally even sold out during the festival. And it was almost packed when, in 1969, Hans W. Geißendörfer, then an unknown, presented DER FALL LENA CHRIST (‘The case of Lena Christ’), a film about the authoritarian structures of society and its institutions.

However, it did occur that the audience demanded a film to be stopped. And once, during the 3rd festival, a screening was indeed interrupted: by public demand, the screening of UNTERMANN – OBERMANN (‘Bottom man – top man’) was stopped.

In the 1969 festival programme Heinz Badewitz wrote: ‘Anyone can show their film in Hof. The only “censorship” that takes place is the limitation to five screenings.’ This still held true a year later when Fassbinder’s GÖTTER DER PEST (‘Gods of the plague’) and Herzog’s AUCH ZWERGE HABEN KLEIN ANGEFANGEN (EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL) were shown and two little cartoons – their heroes were PORNO-HUGO and MICKY MAUS IN VIETNAM – raised a storm of jubilation. Then a new concept was necessary. ‘Five years is a dangerous age for a festival’, the director said. To prevent a crisis, he decided to end the totally open access to the film festival: from then on, a conscious pre-selection would be made.