Hamburg-based producer Fünferfilm is planning a third collaboration with filmmaker Helena Wittmann whose feature Human Flowers Of Flesh is screening at this week’s Filmfest Hamburg.
Wittman’s first collaboration with Fünferfilm was her 2017 debut Drift, followed up by her second feature Human Flowers Of Flesh. The latter world premiered in main competition at Locarno in August.
“The project is at a very early stage as a treatment with the working title of Die Stadt,” revealed Julia Cöllen, who co-founded Fünferfilm with Frank Scheuffele and Karsten Krause in 2016.
Collen said the first draft of the screenplay would likely be ready by next spring, with the financing for the film probably beginning towards the end of 2023, and the shoot in 2025.
“As in Helena’s previous two films, a very unusual heroine will be at the centre of the story and she will be just as independent as they were,” Cöllen said.
Development support for the screenplay has already been granted by Hamburg’s regional film fund MOIN.
Upcoming projects
2022 is turning out to be a particularly busy year for Fünferfilm. The company is now in the final stages of post-production on André Sieger’s documentary La Empresa as well as shooting another two documentary projects by Katharina Pethke and Bulgarian-born photographer Pepa Hristova.
In addition, Fünferfilm’s development slate includes fiction debut features by Croatian filmmaker Mate Ugrin, Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts graduate Willy Hans, and the Berlin-based Chinese queer film pioneer Popo Fan.
Cöllen has taken part in this year’s EAVE Producers Workshop with Ugrin’s Petty Thieves which was presented at Trieste’s When East Meets West co-production market where it won the Film Center Serbia Development Award in January.
In August, the project was pitched at Sarajevo’s CineLink where the producers came away with the € 6,000 Prix ArteKino International.
The coming-of-age drama centres on a young man who makes a living from seasonal jobs and petty thefts in resorts on Croatia’s Adriatic coast until his life is completely thrown out of kilter when a Serbian girl becomes his partner in crime.
Development support has come from MOIN and the Croatian Audiovisual Centre for the project which already has France’s In The Cut and Croatia’s Kadromat in place as co-producers. Principal photography in Croatia is now expected to be scheduled for summer 2024.
“The project’s development will take some time since Mate will be working with amateur actors as he did on his short films,” Cöllen explained. “They will be people who all have experiences very close to those of the film’s main characters, so this means that Mate will be spending a lot of time rehearsing with them and incorporating this into the screenplay.”
Shooting could begin a year earlier - in summer 2023 at locations in Switzerland and southern Germany - for Willy Hans’ Der Fleck which was selected as one of the projects for pitching at Locarno’s Alliance 4 Development co-development platform in August.
Hamburg’s MOIN has already granted script and production support for the project which is inspired by the director’s own youth during his time at a boarding school in southern Germany and has Switzerland’s 8Horses onboard as a co-producer.
Meanwhile, Popo Fan’s Grammatik is a love story between a Chinese student and a Syrian refugee during their studies at a language school in Hamburg, in part inspired by the director’s own experiences of living in Germany for the past five years.
The project is participating in a new cooperative venture for emerging filmmakers from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Germany called Pitch_It@Berlinale. Organised by Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, Prague’s FAMU and the Goethe Institut, the Pitch_It programme began with a five-day producers workshop in Budapest in July and will follow with a networking event during the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn at the end of November, a second producers workshop at FAMU in January, and finally a pitching event before an international jury of industry experts during the Berlinale next February.
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