The Film Festival Cologne mainly uses two typefaces. The first is GT Cinetype, whose use was explained by the lead designer of the project, Holger Risse, in an email on May 9, 2025 (translated from the German:
We use GT Cintetype and GT Alpina for text. It’s a perfect fit for a film festival because the Swiss company Cinetype specialized in subtitling film reels. GT Cinetype is based on an engineer’s design for such a machine. A laser applied the text directly onto the film by removing the ink layer.
The second typeface is GT Alpina, designed by Reto Moser and released in 2020. The type foundry Grilli Type describes it as follows:
GT Alpina proudly calls itself a workhorse serif, but delights in playing with the very meaning of that concept. It reaches into the grab bag of typographic history to resurrect shapes some may falsely see as too expressive, resulting in a meticulous family melding these distinct shapes with a pragmatic execution.