For the past 35 years a small city in northern Bavaria has been host to Germany’s most intimate film festival, a favourite with directors and film enthusiasts alike.

Founded by the directors of the New German Cinema, the Hof International Film Festival has no pretensions and very different to the overblown glamour festivals.

Hof was the starting point of the careers of a number of big names in German film: Werner Herzog, Doris Dörrie and Tom Tykwer, and of course Wim Wenders, who turned the name of the city Hof into an acronym for “Home of Films”

The annual international Film Festival in Hof is renowned for its relaxed atmosphere. The "Hof Filmtage", as it's officially known, was founded in 1967 by Heinz Badewitz.

The festival screens documentaries as well. This year, there's a series called "Denk ich an Deutschland" - "When I think of Germany." Five filmmakers offer a personal view of their homeland.

Director Leander Haussman grew up in East Germany: "We always pretended that we were just in some kind of film. As if the GDR was just a perfidious invention of a scriptwriter. We were the actors. All the other people around us were the extras and we were the main characters, the most important people in the country".

According to Hof International Film Festival Director Heinz Badewitz, the films all have their own kind of truthfulness. "Whether it's a film set in Brandenburg or in Hamburg or in Southern Bavaria - that's irrelevant - it's about people".