MÁRGENES SPECIAL AWARD _ SCHANELEC

The German filmmaker Angela Schanelec (Aalen, 1962), one of the most relevant authors in contemporary European cinema, will receive the 2025 Special Márgenes Award in recognition of her singular trajectory and her contribution to the renewal of cinematographic language.

Trained as an actress and associated with the Berlin School, Schanelec has developed a filmography marked by an austere, poetic, and deeply emotional style. Her work, compared by critics to that of Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Chantal Akerman, addresses with radical delicacy themes such as grief, motherhood, and lack of communication.

Her films have been featured at festivals such as Cannes—where she competed in Un Certain Regard with Marseille (2004) and Plätze in Städten (1998)—and Locarno, where she premiered Der traumhafte Weg (2016) in the official selection. In 2019, she won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale for I Was at Home, But… and in 2023 the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for Music, a contemporary reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth.

Schanelec rejects psychology and narrative conflict, portraying characters in their mere existence, without explanations. Her camera observes with precision and care, generating a poetics of silence where each shot acquires autonomy and its own meaning.

Her cinema proposes a form of resistance to the speed and overexposure of contemporary life. In her films, silence and ellipsis become an act of trust toward the viewer: an invitation to complete the world with their own gaze.

Taken together, her filmography outlines a map of the void and of the intervals where cinematic truth resides. Angela Schanelec has made the cut a form of poetry and demonstrates that cinema can not only tell stories, but also think time and reveal, in its silence, everything that escapes words.