Best New Director 2025
- The Shark Awards
- Oct 7, 2025
- 2 min read
Leve Kühl
The Best New Director award is part of our annual Best New Talent competition held at Kinsale in Ireland where our mission is to provide a platform for young and emerging talent to gain recognition and exposure for their work.
In a quirk of Kinsale tradition, the winner is chosen by the festival delegates who get to watch a shortlist of reels prepared from all the entries by a panel of seasoned industry professionals. This year the shortlisting panel consisted of Tim Page, Jenny O'Connell, Michelle Corney & Sally Miller, chaired by Ronae Rayson.
Ronae: "Celebrating young talent isn’t just about rewarding individuals — it’s about investing in the future of creativity as a whole. New Talent often reflects the complex and rapidly changing world they are inheriting. It is at the heart of fresh perspectives, bold experimentation, passion, courage and the hunger to explore – all in which creativity thrives. Their value is not optional. It is essential. I cannot wait to see the work. I hope we get inundated with submissions".
Leve Kühl is a Berlin-based director working across both fiction and commercial formats, guided by a strong sense of emotion and human connection. Before studying directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, he worked as an editor in San Francisco.
Leve: "It feels surreal and I am very grateful to win Best New Director at the Kinsale Shark Awards. But I also just want to take a moment to say thank you to all the insanely talented people who’ve been part of this journey with me: The executive producers: Jacob Burckhardt, Julian Sünram and Niklas Straub, the DP Jona Riese and the editor Andrew Holmes just to name a few. None of this happens alone, and I am grateful to have such talented friends".
