Academy Award winners and nominees such as Clint Eastwood,[2] Jodie Foster,[3] Christoph Waltz,[4] Atom Egoyan,[5] Julian Schnabel[6] and Tilda Swinton,[citation needed] Dogma-founder Lars von Trier,[7] award-winning director Kim Ki-duk[8] and German directors such as Wim Wenders,[9] Fatih Akin, Andreas Dresen and Tom Tykwer attended the festival in the past.

The Art Cinema Award was established by the Conféderation Internationale des Cinémas d'Art et d'Essai (CICAE).

The audience gets to decide by public vote which of the competing films in the Eurovisuell section is their favorite and receives a prize money of €5,000, donated by the Commerzbank.

Since 2017, the German Foreign Office honors directors who create films across national and cultural borders with a prize money of €10,000 .

The award is granted as part of the "Northern Lights" section to a fiction or documentary film either produced or set in Hamburg or Schleswig-Holstein.