British-German composer Max Richter will be feted at this year’s Berlin Film Festival with the honorary Berlinale Camera Award.
Richter will receive the award on February 18 at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Chloé Zhao, with whom Richter recently collaborated on her latest film, Hamnet, will present the award and deliver a speech. A panel discussion with Max Richter will take place following the presentation.
Richter’s credits include titles like Waltz with Bashir (2008), Ad Astra (2019), Mary Queen of Scots (2018), the HBO series The Leftovers, and Hamnet (2025). He won a European Film Award for Waltz with Bashir and a Grammy nomination for Ad Astra.
Richter has also released several solo projects, including The Blue Notebooks and SLEEP (2015), an 8.5-hour exploration of sound and the sleeping mind, co-created with Yulia Mahr. His last solo album, In A Landscape, was released in 2024.
“Max Richter is one of the great contemporary composers, and film fans can count themselves lucky that he has such a profound passion for cinema,” Berlinale Director Tricia Tuttle said in a statement. “His compositions for film are more than accompaniment; they are narratives that make the heart of a story audible and deepen and transform the cinematic language.”
Previous Berlinale Camera Award honorees include Agnes Varda, Rainer Rother, Richard Linklater, and Edgar Reitz. The award has been handed out since 1986 and was designed by Düsseldorf-based goldsmith artist Georg Hornemann. The unique award consists of 128 individual parts and is modeled after a real film camera.
