What Eight Years at the Munich Film Festival Taught Me About Cinema

It has been eight years since I arrived in Munich. One of my first memories of the city is searching for the Gasteig ticket office and buying five tickets for the Munich Film Festival. At the time, some of those films did not even have trailers available yet. Coming from Peru, where many of these titles would never reach cinemas, it felt almost unreal to have access to films I had only read about online.

Since then, I have attended the festival every year except for 2020, when the pandemic interrupted so many cultural events around the world. With each edition, I learned a little more about how film festivals work: Q&As with directors, actors, writers and producers, panel discussions, industry conversations and, most importantly, the experience of discovering films together with an audience.

Over the years, I have also had the opportunity to meet some of my favorit filmmakers and artists. I remember seeing director Bong Joon-ho bring Parasite to Munich after its Palme d'Or victory and before it became a global phenomenon at the Academy Awards. I attended a conversation with Jia Zhangke and last year participated in a Q&A with Stellan Skarsgård for Sentimental Value. This year, one of the guests I am most excited to see is Paweł Pawlikowski, a filmmaker whose work has had a strong impact on me since I first watched Ida.

When friends ask me for recommendations before the festival begins, I always suggest a few titles I consider essential. But I also encourage them to read the synopses and choose something that genuinely sparks their curiosity. One of the most important things I have learned from festivals is that expectations can sometimes work against a film. Some of my favourite festival experiences came from screenings I attended almost by accident, choosing a film because it fit my schedule rather than because it arrived with major awards or critical acclaim.

That is one of the strengths of the Munich Film Festival. Alongside productions featuring internationally known actors and directors, there are always smaller films that can surprise you and end up becoming your favourite discovery of the year.

The festival also helped me discover Munich itself. Unlike some festivals concentrated in a single venue, Munich spreads across the city. Through the festival, I visited places such as Rio Filmpalast, Gloria Palast, City Kinos, ASTOR, the Film Museum München and Theatiner Kino. Many of these cinemas became part of my regular routine long after the festival ended. Looking back, some of my first explorations of Munich happened while moving from one screening to another.

The experience is not limited to traditional movie theatres either. The festival often creates opportunities to watch films outdoors or in locations that encourage audiences to engage with different parts of the city. For someone arriving from another country and trying to build a connection with a new home, cinema unexpectedly became one of the ways I learned to navigate Munich.

Perhaps the most special aspect of any film festival, however, is the audience. Watching a film in a sold-out screening creates an atmosphere that cannot be replicated at home. Sometimes the audience reacts with applause, sometimes with laughter, and occasionally with visible frustration. Festivals remind us that cinema is a collective experience and that every spectator brings a different perspective to the same film.

One of my favourite memories remains my screening at the Cinema Theatre. The film was shown on a large screen with an audience that knew almost nothing about what was coming. There were no detailed trailers, no endless social media discussions and no spoilers. Watching the crowd react in real time to each twist, surprise and moment of shock reminded me why I continue attending festivals year after year. Those experiences are impossible to recreate once a film becomes part of the general cultural conversation.

This year marks the 43rd edition of the Munich Film Festival, and I will once again be in the audience. The opening film has already been announced: Vaterland, and it has also been confirmed that the director Paweł Pawlikowski and starring Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler are coming for the premiere. I am also hoping to catch several of the films I have written about in my Cannes 2026 articles, from competition titles to Latin American discoveries.

Eight years later, what keeps bringing me back is not the red carpet, the celebrities or the premieres. It is the possibility that, somewhere in the program, there is a film I know nothing about today that will stay with me for years.