IBC is to award this year’s International Honour for Excellence to world-renowned editor Thelma Schoonmaker who will be attending IBC and speaking at the event.
The IHFE recognises Schoonmaker’s extraordinary achievements and lifetime contribution to the art and craft of filmmaking, spanning more than five decades and helping shape modern cinema through her close collaboration with Martin Scorsese.
Thelma Schoonmaker, the recipient of a record three Oscars, will join Carolyn Giardina, Consulting Editor of American Cinema Editors’ ‘Cinema Editor’ Magazine, to discuss her work in film, at a free-to-attend session on 14th September, held at IBC, which takes place at the RAI in Amsterdam .
Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker has been at the forefront of moving picture innovation for over fifty years, having helped Scorsese edit his first feature in 1967 and gone on to collaborate with him in the editing of his creative vision in every major work since Raging Bull. Her credits include Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and most recently, Killers of the Flower Moon.
She is the only editor to receive nine Oscar nominations, winning Academy Awards for Raging Bull, The Aviator and The Departed. Schoonmaker has also won BAFTAs for Raging Bull and Goodfellas, and in 2019 received the BAFTA Fellowship – the British Academy’s highest honour.
A passionate advocate for film restoration, she continues to champion the legacy of her late husband, director Michael Powell, and the landmark works of Powell and Pressburger. The influence of the editing in Scorsese’s films extends across generations of filmmakers, documentary makers and editors, inspiring technical mastery, creativity and unwavering passion for the craft of storytelling.
Michael Crimp, IBC’s Chief Executive Officer, commented: “Thelma Schoonmaker’s unique contribution and legacy is felt across the entire media world. Her dedication to storytelling, technical brilliance and lifelong commitment to collaboration exemplify the very best of our industry. People are at the heart of IBC, and we’re proud to honour those who have not only shaped the media we all know and love – but who continue to inspire new generations to come.”
IBC is also recognising Globo, Latin America’s largest media company, with a Special Award for its continued leadership, innovation and support for global media advancement.
Globo reaches 70 million Brazilians daily and 160 million monthly across all its platforms – open TV, pay TV, streaming, and digital. In 2025, the group celebrates a century of media leadership in Latin America, since the launch of its newspaper O Globo in 1925. The company is at the forefront of the media industry, leading the implementation of TV 3.0 (DTV+) and strategically and ethically integrating AI across its operations.
Alexis Allemann, Sebastien Noir and Andrei Popescu-Belis are being awarded the coveted Best Technical Paper at IBC2025 for their work developing an AI Chatbot for Trusted News, underpinned with strict editorial standards and transparency. The paper is entitled EBU NEO – A sophisticated multilingual chatbot for a trusted news ecosystem exploration.
The authors – from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and la Haute École d’Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud (HEIG-VD) – sought to address the quality, bias and transparency concerns of commercial news chatbots. Their approach was to optimise Retrieval Augmented Generation (a technique used to enhance Large Language Models). The result is a database of over 3.5 million articles growing by 3000 news stories per day, and an invaluable tool for both professional journalists and the public to explore the news.
Paul Entwistle, Chair of the IBC Technical Papers Committee and Peer Review Panel, said: “The paper was very well written, providing an excellent technical disclosure, innovative improvements, detailed performance comparisons and a case study with important lessons on deploying a public-facing AI. The topic itself, trusted news in the age of AI, is critically important, with the EBU uniquely positioned to develop such a system. The paper highlights the scale and complexity of the task, the impressive capabilities that AI can bring, as well as reminding us of its current limitations. This is excellent work – and significant beyond our own industry.”
The paper – alongside 22 other successful Technical Papers – was selected by IBC’s international peer review panel of 20 media technology experts from 337 submissions covering original research on solutions to real-world problems faced by the international broadcast and digital media industry. The Best Technical Paper will be formally presented at the IBC2025 Conference on Saturday 13th September at 13:30 CEST and celebrated at the IBC Innovation Awards presentation on Sunday 14 September, alongside Thelma Schoonmaker, Globo, and all other award winners, at an invitation only event.
Pippa Considine
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