Cyber Security Film Festival

Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany - December 12, 2025

An open call for 3-minute films that turn packets into plot and firewalls into feeling—because awareness grows louder when it whispers through story

We have spent years refining bytes and thresholds, but the moment a security culture really hardens is when it learns to speak in scenes, not screenshots. That conviction is the origin of the Cyber Security Film Festival, a county-wide invitation for directors, students, animators and citizens to translate the abstract dread of breaches into three minutes of human narrative. No ransom notes in neon green, no hoodie silhouettes typing into darkness; instead we want living rooms where smart-fridges gossip, village fetes where QR codes betray trust, grandmothers who learn two-factor authentication because the grandchild’s voice on the phone suddenly sounds wrong. The festival is not a side quest to our engineering roadmap—it is the final layer of defence: emotion memory, the only patch that never needs regression testing.

The mechanics are intentionally lightweight: any genre, any format up to 180 seconds, any language with English subtitles, and a zero-entry-fee submission portal that opens 1 February 2026. A jury split evenly between filmmakers and security engineers will score on a single rubric—does the piece change the viewer’s next click? Technical accuracy is welcomed but not enforced; we care less about depicting the correct TLS handshake than about conveying the stomach-drop of seeing your own face deep-faked into a plea for money. The top twenty shorts will be screened in July inside the old power turbine hall on the Buna site, a 400-metre-long cathedral of steel that once cracked hydrocarbons and will now crack complacency. Projection mapping on the 18-metre boiler wall will extend each frame into immersive scale, so that a phishing email blown up to the size of a factory window becomes as visceral as the smell of burnt rubber used to be.

Prizes are modest by industry standards but significant by regional ones: 10 000 € for the Golden Lock award, 5 000 € for the Audience Click, and a special county grant of 3 000 € for a team that commits to filming entirely within Anhalt-Bitterfeld and involving at least three local residents as crew. The money is drawn from the cultural budget that EFRE rules allow inside innovation projects, so every euro spent on storytelling is also an euro spent on economic development—an equation we have never seen balance so elegantly before. More importantly, the winning films enter a Creative-Commons licence pool that schools, libraries and SMEs can stream royalty-free for awareness training, turning a single creative act into a renewable educational asset that outlives any trophy shelf.

Production support is provided in the form of open-access b-roll: the Alliance will release anonymised SOC dashboards, vintage shots of the chemical complex, and clean recordings of legacy machinery—clanks, hisses, turbine whine—so that teams on zero budgets can still achieve cinematic texture. We also offer a match-making platform where security engineers volunteer as script consultants; they will not write dialogue, but they will answer questions like “What does a SOC operator actually feel when the first alert pops at 03:14?” or “How quiet does a server room become when someone pulls the wrong drive?” That granularity is the texture audiences subconsciously recognise as authentic, the microscopic detail that convinces them the stakes on screen could be their own inbox tomorrow morning.

"Firewalls fail; stories stick. The festival is our patch for the human OS."

The long-term ambition is to weave the festival into the county’s cultural calendar the same way the Kurt-Weill-Fest in Dessau celebrates musical modernity. By 2028 we envision parallel tracks: a youth day where school classes produce 60-second shorts on phone-scams, and an industry day where security vendors commission artistic interpretations of zero-day markets—commissioned, but still judged by the same emotional-impact yardstick. If we succeed, the phrase “going to the cyber film night” will no longer sound like an oxymoron; it will feel as natural as going to the Christmas market, and the stories told in the turbine hall will travel back into living rooms across Europe, quietly instructing every grandmother, gamer and gig-worker that resilience begins not with a tool but with a hesitation, a second glance, a breath that interrupts the click.

The Cyber Resilience Alliance is a public-private partnership established 2025, led by CypSec, Validato and the County of Mansfeld-Südharz. The Alliance operates a sovereign private-cloud security stack, a shared SOC and an cyber academy, aiming to make Mansfeld-Südharz the reference site for rural cyber resilience by 2030.

Media Contact: Daria Fediay, Chief Executive Officer at CypSec - daria.fediay@cypsec.de.