Irish-Scottish filmmaker Mark Cousins will curate the 38th European Film Awards ceremony to create “a live film essay” alongside a creative team also including film composer Dascha Dauenhauer and stage director Robert Lehniger.
The announcement by the European Film Academy, which oversees the awards, comes as it attempts to reposition and expand the footprint of the European-cinema focused prizes and event within the wider awards season.
The 38th ceremony will take place at the House of World Culture in Berlin on January 17 2026, rather than its previous traditional December slot.
The date change first announced in 2023 to come into force in 2026, means the EFA ceremony will take place just after the Golden Globes on January 11, and during the Oscar nomination voting period.
As part of the revamp, the European Film Academy said it wanted to move away from generic scripts dominated by award categories and acceptance speeches to create an event exploring “why do we love cinema?”.
The European Film Awards is a joint production between the European Film Academy and its in-house production arm, European Film Academy Productions with Jürgen Biesinger as the show’s leading producer.
“Together with Academy President Juliette Binoche and outgoing Chairman Mike Downey, we have worked in the past year to fulfil our shared wish to create a more idiosyncratic form to celebrate European cinema,” said European Film Academy Director Matthijs Wouter Knol.
“Cinema has been born in Europe. And Europe continuously forms the source of new international talent, daring storytelling and technical innovation, that all impact the images we see. Being able to work now with Robert, Dascha and Mark is an important step to create an event that can’t be missed.”
Mark Cousins is best known for his documentary films which include the 15-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) and Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema (2019), which was awarded the European Film Award for Innovative Storytelling in 2020.
More recently, his film The March On Rome was nominated for Best European Documentary at the 35th European Film Awards. His last work, A Sudden Glimpse To Deeper Things, about artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, won the Crystal Globe for best film in Karlovy Vary in 2024.
Cousins co-directed a number of innovative staged film events with Tilda Swinton with whom he also initiated the 8 1/2 Foundation, aiming to link children to the world of cinema.
“I love playing with the form of film events, so I jumped at the chance to be part of the European Film Awards’ evening. We hope to have some surprises. We’ll try to conjure cinematic images, emotions and ideas. I’m honoured to work with Robert, Dascha and the Academy team, in a building I’ve long admired,” said Cousins.
Moscow-born Berlin-based composer Dauenhauer won a European Film Award for her original score for Berlin Alexanderplatz (Burhan Qurbani, 2020) and most recently, her second German Film Award for her score for Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands (2025).
Her other works include the scores for Evolution (Kornél Mundruczó, 2021), Golda (Guy Nattiv, 2023) and Tatami (Guy Nattiv and Zar Amir Ebrahimi, 2024).
German-born Lehniger is a theatre director and video artist who has worked throughout the German, Swiss and Austrian theatre landscape. His work is characterized by the use of digital media in combination with stage performance, bridging the gap between theatre and cinema.
Among his many productions fuelled by his passion for cinema are The Dreamers (2009), based on the novel by Gilbert Adair, Week End (2010), inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s eponymous 1967 feature, and Katzelmacher inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1969 film.
Since 2022, he has also been the Principal of the MetFilm School in Berlin. He also already oversaw the stage direction of the European Film Awards in 2023.
A shortlist of 67 films eligible to be nominated for the 2026 awards was announced on October 14.
They will be voted on in 23 categories by the European Film Academy’s 5,400 members over the coming weeks, with the main nominations announced on November 18 during the 22nd Seville European Film Festival in Spain.
