Germany-born Katja Adomeit has spent most of her career in Denmark, first at Zentropa and, since 2011, through her own dynamic outfit Adomeit Film.
She collaborates regularly with New Zealand’s Daniel Borgman (The Weight Of Elephants, Resin), and Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat (Wolf And Sheep, The Orphanage and this year’s Berlinale opening film No Good Men). She has also co-produced features including Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure and The Square.
Adomeit has won prizes at Cannes for short films and is developing several projects based on her own life that she plans to direct; she has already shot some footage. Collaborations are also in the works with Lars von Trier’s filmmaking daughters Agnes Trier and Selma Sunniva.
What is your office like?
I am working from home in the kitchen. I live in the countryside. I moved out of Copenhagen in 2020 and now I have a five-year-old child. I have one colleague working in the office and hopefully I can employ her when we greenlight the next production.
What was your first job in the film industry?
I started out as Peter Aalbæk Jensen’s personal assistant at Zentropa in 2005. I was living in Berlin after a year in New Zealand and I applied to all the interesting, for me, companies in the world. Only Peter Aalbæk answered and invited me for a job interview. He said: “Learn Danish, and then I will give you a job.” A week later, I moved to Denmark and learned Danish for 13 hours every day for three months. I was then producer assistant to Meta Louise Foldager and eventually became post producer.
What was your favourite film growing up?
My best memories were going to the cinema to see films like Titanic and Romeo + Juliet with my sister and my mum. I grew up in a village with only one street, with like 20 houses, nothing more. But it was close to Lubeck near Hamburg.
What do you like best about your job?
The long-term friendships with directors and crew. [Filmmaking] is so hard and intense, it only makes sense if you can have fun.
What are you most proud of professionally?
I never give up. Also my instinct for amazing projects, and developing and financing them. I think financing films is really creative, [I like] finding small rules [I can use] that a lot of people don’t know about.
What has been your biggest professional mistake?
Concentrating and working so much for other directors that I don’t have time to look at my own projects as a director. I have ideas of projects that I’ve written. They are personal, about my life, and I want to direct them. There have been shooting periods [on them] so I have a lot of raw footage on a hard drive. I know they’re good projects.
With whom would you most like to take a meeting?
Sandra Hüller. I am a big fan since Requiem [directed by Hans-Christian Schmid] in 2006. I want to make a project with her.
Where would you like to be five years from now, professionally?
To have a bigger company and a more secure income. And to have made a film with Sandra.
If you didn’t work in film, what job would you do?
I would be a trainer of Icelandic horses. I have an Icelandic horse and it’s such meditation to ride because you cannot think of anything else.
Who would play you in the biopic of your life and who would direct it?
Sandra Hüller would star and Shahrbanoo Sadat would direct. We are actually developing this project as a comedy called Made IN Germany, although we haven’t sent it to Sandra yet. Shahrbanoo is playing the other lead role. The film is based on our friendship and how we made No Good Men over the last seven years. The film explores the intense and close collaboration between director and producer, the shared fight to tell an authentic Afghan story under extraordinary circumstances and the challenges of their personal lives, while making a deeply personal film.
What are you working on next?
I am working on several projects. Illum Jacobi’s Another Journey Without Women, which we are shooting this year. Also Daniel Borgman’s The Miserables, and with Selma Sunniva, Lars von Trier’s daughter, on a project called Zero. She’s insanely good. I’m also working with Shahrbanoo on three projects at the same time, and with writer Line Langebek Knudsen [who co-wrote The Girl With The Needle] on a film based on a Danish book called Mirror, Shoulder, Signal.
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