New films by Fatih Akin, Bora Dagtekin and Sergei Loznitsa, plus Prime Video series Embassy, are among the projects awarded more than €12m in pr
New films by Fatih Akin, Bora Dagtekin and Sergei Loznitsa, plus Prime Video series Embassy, are among the projects awarded more than €12m in production support by three German film funds.
The Cologne-based regional fund Film- und Medienstiftung NRW allocated €2m (of around €7.7m in production funding) to six-part series Embassy, produced by Turbine Studios Germany with the UK’s Ascendant Fox for Prime Video. It will shoot on location in North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW) for 60 days this year.
Directed by Adolfo Kolmerer and John Strickland, Embassy stars JK Simmons as a US diplomat who is forced to work together with his former lover, a British SAS soldier, after an attack on the American Embassy in London.
The funding session also supported Geister weinen nicht from Golden Bear winner Fatih Akin, a love story written by Ruth Toma who also worked on his 2002 film Solino.
Other projects backed are Constantin Film’s production of Marc Rothemund’s Das gewisse Etwas, based on the 2024 French comedy Un p’tit truc en plus; and David Wnendt’s adaptation of the Nils Westerboer novel Athos 2643, which was selected for this year’s Venice Gap-Financing Market.
The Cologne fund also supported several international co-productions including Panos Cosmatos’ Flesh Of Gods, Patrice Toye’s The Assignment, Hlynur Pálmason’s On Land And Sea, and Arash and Arman Riahi’s 30 Bullets.
FFF Bayern production support
Fack Ju Göhte director Bora Dagtekin received €900,000, the largest single amount, from Bavaria’s regional fund FFF Bayern for his comedy Der Perfekte Urlaub, a sequel to his previous film Das Perfekte Geheimnis and featuring the same ensemble cast. It is based on Paolo Genovese’s Italian box-office hit Perfect Strangers.
The funding committee also allocated production support to two projects with Oscar-nominated September 5 screenwriter Moritz Binder attached: Alireza Golfashan’s thriller Zoma and Pia Hellenthal’s 1980s-set comedy Die Sterne oder der Tod.
Zoma is the first project produced by Golafshan’s Munich-based outfit Story Garden Film. Die Sterne oder der Tod is Hellenthal’s fiction feature debut following 2019 feature documentary Searching Eva and is produced by Trimafilm.
Funding also went to the second season of Turbokultur’s mini-series The Doubters, about the life of a Jewish family in contemporary Frankfurt; Christina Tournatzés’ romantic comedy series Tamim; and Nordpolaris’ RTL comedy series Highter & Wolkig about the bureaucratic hurdles that need to be overcome before opening a cannabis cafe in a Bavarian village.
Backing for documentaries
Essential Filmproduktion’s production of Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium (working title) is one of six documentary projects receiving funding of around €900,000 in total as part of the German government’s jury-based cultural film funding programme.
The film will be based entirely on archive footage shot by Italian filmmakers throughout the former Soviet Union between 1970 and 1973.
Also supported at this sitting was The Last Summer by Ukrainian-Polish directorial duo Eleanora Iadkouskaya and Jan Jurczak who had presented their project this year’s Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in March.
COMMENTS