Newsletter/Press Release – 2024-01-24

21st Tegernsee International Mountain Film Festival, 16 to 20 October 2024

New Director for the Tegernsee Mountain Film Festival:
Michael Pause hands over to Tom Dauer

Over the course of 2024, the Tegernsee Mountain Film Festival’s long-standing Artistic Director, Michael Pause, will hand over his responsibilities to filmmaker and author Tom Dauer, who hails from the nearby town of Valley. This was announced by Mayor Johannes Hagn at the City of Tegernsee’s New Year’s reception.

Michael Pause himself requested this changeover. Together with festival founder Otto Guggenbichler and former Mayor Peter Janßen, Pause helped from the very beginning to set up and direct the festival. Pause: “It’s been both a pleasure and an honour to develop this event, together with an enthusiastic team, over the course of more than twenty years. Thanks to the great commitment of professionals and volunteers, we have succeeded in putting together a festival that is respected in the mountain film scene around the globe. After last autumn’s 20th anniversary, I decided to unclip myself from the roped team and to hand over the ‘sharp end of the rope’ to Tom Dauer. I couldn’t ask for a more formidable successor.”

Pause and Dauer will jointly plan the 21st Mountain Film Festival, but Dauer will open the event on 16 October 2024 as its new official director. At the request of Mayor Johannes Hagn, Pause will remain associated with the festival as a patron.

An enthusiastic and outstanding mountaineer and climber himself, Tom Dauer has been familiar with the Mountain Film Festival from its inception. As early as the second festival in 2004, he received a Prize for the Best Landscape Film. Mountains are always the focus of his activities as a filmmaker – for example for the Bavarian Broadcasting (BR) mountaineering show “Bergauf-Bergab” – and as a book author. As a screenwriter and co-director, Dauer worked on the documentary “Streif – One Hell of a Ride”, which was awarded the Austrian Film Award ROMY. Dauer also works as a curator for the Alpen Film Festival, which, like the Tegernsee Festival, is hosted in the District of Miesbach. Dauer: “I have been working with Micki Pause for 25 years and very much look forward to shouldering this demanding responsibility. Preserving the uniqueness of the Tegernsee Mountain Film Festival and further strengthening its profile is a great challenge – and that’s exactly how I like it.”

Tom Dauer was born in 1969 and grew up in Mexico City and Munich. His parents instilled in him a love for the mountains. As an alpinist and climber, he visited the Patagonian Andes, the Himalayas and the Karakoram. A student of literary criticism and a graduate of the German School for Journalism (DJS), he chooses to work in the mountains of the world, where he can fuse his passion and profession. His books engage with the mountains, mountaineering and adventure, including the title “Cerro Torre – Mythos Patagonien (The Myth of Patagonia)” as well as the biographies “Reinhard Karl – “Ein Leben ohne Wenn und Aber (A Life Without Ifs and Buts)” and “Kurt Albert – Frei klettern, frei denken, frei sein (Free Climbing, Free Thinking, Free Being)”. For the past 15 years, he has been writing a column for the magazine ALPIN. As screenwriter and director, Tom Dauer created various documentaries, among them “Sechs große Nordwände der Alpen (Six Great North Faces of the Alps)”, “Skitour ins Ungewisse (Ski Tour into the Unknown)” and “Marmolata – Königin der Dolomiten (Queen of the Dolomites)”. Together with his family, Tom Dauer lives on a remote farmstead between Munich and the Alpine foothills.

Further Information: Sonderbüro Bergfilm-Festival Tegernsee, Rathausplatz 1, 83684 Tegernsee, Germany
Phone +49(0)8022-1801-37 or -53, bergfilm@tegernsee.de, www.bergfilm-tegernsee.de