In Memoriam Hilke Doering

We are deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague Hilke Doering, director of the International Competition since 1995, who passed away in Bielefeld on November 27, 2025, after a long and serious illness.

Born in 1966, Hilke Doering grew up in Germany and Switzerland. She studied sociology in Bielefeld and Paris, conducting research in visual sociology and ethnography. Hilke Doering began working for the Oberhausen Festival in 1991 as an intern under then festival director Angela Haardt. From 1995, she headed the International Competition and, until 2004, the Children’s and Youth Cinema section, too. As the head of international festival policy, she was active in numerous associations, film policy networks, and institutions, including serving as a board member of the European Coordination of Film Festivals from 1996 to 2000 and as president of the International Short Film Conference from 1998 to 2003. Since 1996, she regularly attended international film and video festivals as a jury member and curated countless programmes worldwide. She was also one of the driving forces behind the European Short Film Network (ESFN), founded in 2018, and its online short film platform „THIS IS SHORT,“ launched in 2021. Despite her illness, she continued to advise us until mid-November.

“Her aesthetic vision, her special sensitivity and perspective on films beyond the (North-Western) canon, such as Latin American cinema, Francophone and Anglophone African cinema, experimental forms, and innovative gender positions beyond simplistic identity politics, and her distrust of political functionalisation, were always very important to me and all my colleagues on the festival committee. Her passionate commitment and extensive historical and socio-political knowledge, her farsighted perspective on the festival politics and concept of Oberhausen, her dry humour as well as her argumentative spirit and warmth – we miss so much of that now, and will continue to miss it.” (Madeleine Bernstorff, Artistic Director of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen)