Objective: Psychiatric educators are often faced with students' negative attitudes toward psychiatry. A new type of seminar has been established in order to enable students to gain a deeper understanding of psychiatric illness. Method: A "cinemeducation seminar," combining a movie, a lecture, and a patient interview, has been established as part of the undergraduate curriculum at Hamburg Medical School, where 1,032 students attended 39 cinemeducation seminars between 2005 and 2008. A student evaluation covering different aspects of education took place after each seminar. Results: The students valued the combination of a movie and a seminar and found the movie and the additional patient interview useful for accessing the subject of Psychiatry and understanding the underlying psychiatric illnesses shown in the movies. Conclusion: From the students' perspective, this type of seminar seems to be helpful for providing an impression of psychiatric illnesses and enabling students to put themselves in the position of a person suffering from these illnesses. Therefore, we judged the cinemeducation seminar to be an appropriate teaching format in undergraduate medical education. (Contains 3 tables.)