Throughout the last years the Great TV Festival has presented numerous top-class TV premiers in Germany. Whether national top-productions, international films and series or documentaries – the festivals valuable and thorough program selection has always thrilled and inspired a large audience. Solely in 2011 more than 3500 people attended the festival in the Cinedom in Cologne.

Over the past five years the festival has developed to a popular stage for German TV premieres. Numerous visitors, actors and producers have made their way to Cologne to celebrate the premiers together. The festival shows a wide range of outstanding productions such as Frau Böhm sagt Nein starring the actor Senta Berger, the controversially discussed TV-drama Wut or the elaborate ZDF-production Armageddon – Die längste Nacht. The popular German cult series Tatort has also celebrated its premieres and anniversaries within the festival.

In addition to national TV contributions especially international top-class productions find great interest of the audience. Thus to this demand the festival showed the German premieres of the acclaimed and award-winning U.S. series Mad Men, Lost and In Treatment. Outstanding productions such as Dirty Sexy Money, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Grey Gardens with Drew Barrymore and the euthanasia drama You don’t know Jack starring Al Pacino and Susan Sarandon were also shown for the first time in Cologne.

In 2011 several top international productions impressed the audience of the Great TV Festival. In the sold-out house the audience saw the perfectly staged mafia series Boardwalk Empire, the British hit series Downtown Abbey and the newly arranged remake Sherlock – A Study in Pink. An excellent critical and satiric political cinema was presented with contributions like Too Big To Fail and The Special Relationship.

Next to inspiring the audience with fictional movies, the festival also presents thrilling and excellent documentaries with similar compelling effect. Delicate works like Kinshasa Symphony and Herbstgold, visually stunning movies like Geschichte der Ozeane by Frank Schätzing or dramatic historical documentaries such as Lost Children, have shown the high-quality of this film genre. At the latest the glimpse of the thrilled and impressed audience show this compelling effect.