Hamburg’s Abaton Wins Top Honors at Europa Cinemas Awards

COLOGNE, Germany – Hamburg’s Abaton movie theater has won this year’s top prize for best programming at the Europa Cinemas Awards handed out by the European association of art house theaters. The three-screen location, managed by Matthias Elwardt, sells more than 250,000 tickets a year and focuses particularly on films from first-time directors.

Europa Cinemas’ young audience award went to a trio of Scottish venues: the Glasgow Film Theatre, Filmhouse in Edinburgh and Dundee Contemporary Arts in Dundee. All three participate in Scotland’s Young Audiences Cinema Network, through which they coordinate programming, share prints and jointly apply for state-backed support.

Polish theater owner Roman Gutek won the Entrepreneur of the Year honor for his Kino Muranow cinema in Warsaw. In addition to managing the two-screen art house theater, Gutek runs his own distribution firm, Gutek Film and its children’s animated label Maly Gutek and is the founder and artistic director of the New Horizons film festival in Wroclaw, Poland.

The Europa Cinemas network is an association of nearly 3,000 art house cinemas across 64 countries.