The Golden Camera of the 32nd IFF Art Film Košice was presented at Kunsthalle Košice on Wednesday, 24 June 2026, to German-Turkish director Fatih Akin. The festival gave him the award for his contribution to European and world cinema. A holder of awards from Berlinale, Cannes, Venice and the European Film Awards who broke through internationally with the drama Head On (2004) and continued with a number of further films including In the Fade (2017), Akin came to Košice after years of efforts by the organisers to secure his participation. The festival also screened his latest film, the drama Amrum (2025), which world-premiered in the Cannes Première section at the 78th Cannes Film Festival and marks an aesthetic departure from his earlier work.
To a question from festival artistic director Martin Palúch — how Fatih Akin has changed since the great success of Head On — he answered with the distance of twenty years: “First of all I was younger. A lot of things have changed in the meantime: before I had no children, both my parents were still alive, I had no production company of my own, I didn’t have so much responsibility. You could say that life happened in between. I don’t want to be sentimental, but I have to say that perhaps I lost something on the front of innocence, but I also gained something,” said Akin and added: “I actually can’t watch Head On today. I see in it the technical limits I had at the time. Even though I recognise the strength of the story, the weight of the theme and the innocence portrayed in the film, I always wanted above all to be a skilled filmmaker. When I was shooting Head On, I didn’t really know exactly where to put the camera, how to light it, how to cast, how to structure dialogue. Today I know much more about all that,” he explained. He compared himself to a boxer: “I wouldn’t say I’m more Hitchcockian. I’m rather a boxer who keeps getting better. I would probably compare myself to Sugar Ray Leonard,” he added.
During his masterclass Akin also mentioned Prince’s album and song Purple Rain. Asked whether at the time of its release, when he was eleven, he was ready for it, he answered: “I think I was. Today I am fifty-two and I still remember the moment I first heard that song. It was at home, at my parents’ house, where we had a cassette deck with a radio in the kitchen. Every Saturday the radio played the top 20 chart. I used to record those songs and one of the last singles they played was precisely Purple Rain. It was at the end of 1984, a year you could call the year of Prince,” said Akin. Then they also played other Prince songs, When Doves Cry and Baby I’m a Star. “Those three songs hit me so much that I played them over and over. I don’t know if I understood the music, but I felt it. And it’s something I still feel today when I hear the first notes of those songs,” he added. In the 1990s he turned away from Prince for a while towards hip-hop, but at the start of the new millennium he came back to him. He planned to make a documentary about him, but Prince died before the project could be realised.
At the press conference Fatih Akin also presented his plans for the future. He admitted that for the first time in his life he does not know which film will be his next. “I’m working on a documentary about music. It will be a portrait of Turkish artist Gaye Su Akyol, who lives in Berlin. As for fiction features, I have two in development. One is about Marlene Dietrich, with Diane Kruger in the lead, and the other is a Turkish film in preparation. The one for which I raise money first will be the next one,” said Akin. The upcoming documentary about psychedelic rock singer and composer Gaye Su Akyol, whom international music critics in recent years describe as one of the most distinctive representatives of today’s Anatolian rock scene, was unveiled by Akin in Cannes 2025 under the working title Anatolian Dragon. Of his fiction projects he leans more towards the Turkish one, but is equally aware of the urgency of making the film about Marlene Dietrich: “I think it’s a luxurious position to be able to say that both of these films are good. If I died after one of them, I’d say that they were both good enough and I’m happy with them. And maybe precisely because I don’t know for which I’ll raise money first, a third project may come up that I don’t even know about yet,” he summed up.
About the Turkish film he didn’t want to reveal details. “It’s a film inspired by a novel I acquired the rights to some time ago. It’s a story about the collapse of a society, something similar to Underground by Emir Kusturica,” said Akin. He was drawn to the theme by current reality and the position of Europe in the geopolitical context: “I feel that we are living through some kind of collapse of community. In Europe we have ended up between two technocratic powers, the USA and China. As they become larger, the European idea also becomes more important, but it seems threatened. This film can be a warning, it can be a reflection, or a reaction to what is happening right now. It depends on how quickly I finish the film,” he said. Although the story is set in Turkey, Akin would prefer to treat it more universally, in the spirit of Orson Welles: “I would like the film to be more mysterious, so that it could happen anywhere and at any time. I’m writing the lead female role directly for a particular actress whom I am a great fan of,” he added. She is Turkish actress Merve Dizdar, who in 2023 became the first Turkish woman to win the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, for the drama About Dry Grasses / Kuru Otlar Üstüne, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
When asked which of his screenplays is the most personal, Akin paused. “You could say that often in my films it is the female characters that reveal my personality, or at least certain aspects of it. Katja in In the Fade is me. In the upcoming Turkish film I mentioned, the main character is a woman. I was inspired by my daughter and my mother. I started thinking about what I would do in their situation, how I would react if I hadn’t been born a man,” he said, adding that in his films he always sides with the weaker. “In The Golden Glove the main character (who is a weak figure himself) kills someone even weaker. People often talk about immigrants or members of the LGBT community. But if you look at it, in many societies the most vulnerable group are women. Femicide, murders only because you are a woman, that is something completely insane. On a global scale, everything that is happening in the world, all those Trumps and Putins, actually stems from men being afraid of women,” Akin summed up.
Asked what role film festivals have played in his life, Akin answered through a metaphor. “I’m a big fan of sci-fi literature and I love the idea that the world functions as a system of portals — you walk through one and end up in a completely different world, in a different time-space, in a different dimension. In my view film festivals do exactly that. They are a kind of portal to a different audience, to different people who look at things differently,” he said. Without festivals he would, he believes, have no career: “I was lucky to step into the right portals, both bigger and smaller. I might prefer the smaller ones, because they have a particular charm.”
To finish, Akin admitted: “I have kids. They’re Generation Z and I think it’s not them who learn from me, but I who learn more from them. Young people have much more radical ideas, but also a much more radical approach to making films, in the positive sense. There’s innovation in it, freshness, the ability to see things differently, to work with small budgets. How they treat one another, how they approach gender identity — it is something completely different from how I was brought up.” His final advice to young filmmakers he summed up in one sentence: “If I had to leave them with one thing, it would probably be to watch more films.”
The 32nd IFF ART FILM is made possible thanks to the support of:
Main organizer: ART FILM FEST s.r.o.
Co-organizers: City of Košice, K13 – Košice Cultural Centres, Visit Košice, ART FILM FEST, n.o.
With the financial support of: Audiovisual Fund
The project was co-financed by the Košice Self-governing Region from the Terra Incognita program
Main partners: CODES Brand House, H2O FUND SICAV, Fors – stav
Automotive partner: AUTO-VALAS
Official hotel: Hotel Yasmin
Main media partners: TV JOJ, Pravda, Eurotelevízia
Sponsors: U. S. Steel Košice, ANTIK Telecom, Kino Úsmev, LOKO TRANS Media, CORE Labs, Technical University of Košice
Technological partners: NOV, ZEBRA, Deutsche Telekom Systems Solutions Slovakia, DELTA OnLine, ARICOMA, Datacomp
Official suppliers: DKC Veritas, PLOOM, DOMOS SLOVAKIA, Reštaurácia Contessa, Natura, Kinley, Budweiser Budvar, Julius Meinl
Official wine: KubBo Select, Ostrožovič
Media partners: JOJ play, JOJ 24, Film Europe Media Company, Rádio KOŠICE, Aktuality.sk, Forbes, Startitup.sk, Korzár, Slovenka, SITA, TASR, Mediaboard, AHOJ TV, See & Go, BigMedia, Kino Sterio, Košice City Guide, Košice V Skratke, MOJAkultura.sk, Česko-Slovenská filmová databáze – ČSFD, Filmsk.sk, diva.sk, koktejl.sk, zenskyweb.sk, Naše Košice
Partners: JOJ Cinema, Jojko, Slovak Film Institute, WITKOWITZ SLOVAKIA, DDDental, CK TUI ReiseCenter Slovensko, Wallonie-Bruxelles International.be, Taper, ECO Technologies, Aupark Shopping Center Košice, Košice Public Transport Company, Košice International Airport, YumEarth, Rent2Eat, CPK Transport, iWish.sk, Kvety Garomi, Hair Factory Košice, Face up! Studio by Michaela Petroci, Panta Rhei, ARTFORUM, LOCAL NOMAD, East Slovak Museum in Košice, MIHYRING
