IBC has awarded this year’s International Honour for Excellence (IHFE) to world-renowned editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
The award recognises her 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. The award will be presented in person on Sunday 14 September at 18:00 CEST on the main stage of the IBC Conference in the RAI Amsterdam. Earlier in the day at the IBC Conference, Thelma Schoonmaker will also participate in a Fireside Chat about her life in film, hosted by journalist and author Carolyn Giardina, Consulting Editor of American Cinema Editors’ ‘Cinema Editor’ Magazine. The session will be free to attend for all IBC2025 attendees.
Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker has been at the forefront of moving picture innovation for more than 50 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 a record three 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.
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."
Globo recognised with Special Award for 100 Years of innovation
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. Alongside consistent commitment to industry collaboration, cultural storytelling and audience connection, Globo is leading new initiatives to accelerate Brazil’s next broadcasting evolution with the rollout of TV 3.0.
Globo is, above all, a great storyteller of Brazilian stories, reaching 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.
Swiss team awarded Best Technical Paper for research on AI for Trusted News
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 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.
Schoonmaker’s free-to-attend session will take place on Sunday 14th September at 16:15 CEST on stage 1 of the IBC Conference. For more information on the IBC Conference, please visit: https://show.ibc.org/conference-experience
Learn more about the IBC Innovation Awards and finalists at: https://show.ibc.org/ibc-awards
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