Deutsches Filminstitut

The Deutsches Filminstitut is a non-profit association, founded in 1949 and based in Frankfurt, sponsored on a sustained basis by representatives of the Federal Government for Culture and Media, the State of Hessen, the municipalities of Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, the umbrella organisation of the film industry, the public broadcasting authorities, the Television Voluntary Self-Regulating body, the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, as well as by the concerns TaurusMedia License Service GmbH and EOS Entertainment GmbH. They are members of the supervisory management committee chaired by the head of Frankfurt’s Cultural Department, Prof. Dr. Felix Semmelroth. The managerial board of the sponsoring association, chosen for a three-year term, consists of Frankfurt lawyer and notary Dr. Dr. h.c. Nikolaus Hensel and the Director of the Institute and the Museum, Claudia Dillmann. The Deutsches Filminstitut is in charge of the administration and IT departments, the film archive, collections/library and the Museum, including its cinema. In addition, it organises, as annual projects, LUCAS, the International Children’s Film Festival, and goEast – the festival of Central and Eastern European cinema.

Among the important projects of the Deutsches Filminstitut is filmportal.de, the central Internet platform, which provides reliable information about all German cinema films. The Deutsches Filminstitut played a leading role, together with 15 other European film archives and cinematheques, in setting up the online portal www.europeanfilmgateway.eu, which since July 2011 has offered free access to hundreds of thousands of film history documents held by the 16 participating institutions. In February 2012 the project was expanded: EFG1914 is a digitalisation project concentrating on the First World War. 25 partners have set themselves the goal of digitising and making accessible to the public 654 hours of film and 5.600 film-related documents dealing with the topic of World War One.