EXCLUSIVE: Dirk Decker and Andrea Schutte’s German production outfit Tamtam Film is gearing up to shoot two films this year.
Aliaksei Paluyan’s fiction feature debut Legacy, which has signed Polish actor Bartosz Bielenia in the lead, will film in Poland this summer, while cameras will roll on Charlotte Sieling’s historical drama The Closed Book, in Copenhagen in May, on which Tamtam is the minority partner.
In Legacy, Bielenia will play a young architect who becomes politicised in the face of the brutal suppression of anti-government protests in Belarus in 2020. His increasing political engagement brings him into conflict with his father and drives a rift through the family.
The €3m film is a co-production with Poland’s Lava Films and the director’s Living Pictures Production.
“Legacy returns to the events Aliaksei had addressed in his documentary Courage, which had its world premiere at the Berlinale in 2021 and is now being presented in fictional form,” said Dirk Decker of Tamtam Film.
The screenplay was written by Paluyan with Karamizade, who had been the editor on Courage, and Esther Bernstorff, co-screenwriter of Petra Biondina Volpe’s English-language debut Frank & Louis, which premiered in Sundance last month.
Shooting is planned for August and September in Warsaw and in the Bialystok region near the border with Belarus.
“As the film will be shot in Belarusian, our casting director has been looking to cast Belarusian actors currently living in exile to give greater realism and authenticity,” Decker said. “Bartosz was born in Bialystok, and he has now started having lessons to learn Belarusian for his role.”
Copenhagen shoot
Hamburg-based Tamtam is co-producing The Closed Book with SF Studios, having previously served as the German co-producer on Sieling’s 2023 film Way Home.
Set in Copenhagen at the end of the 19th century, the film’s plot is based on Jette A. Kaarsbol’s novel of the same name about a woman who discovers that freedom can have its price when she decides to enter into an unconventional marriage with a progressive doctor instead of her conservative fiancé. It stars Alba August and Gustav Lindh.
“Shooting is scheduled to begin in May in studios in Copenhagen and at outside locations,” said Tamtam Film’s Andrea Schütte about the minority co-production.
“The film’s postproduction will be done in Hamburg at Post Republic, and this project is likely to see us working again with production designer Seth Turner and his team, who were behind the set for Kai Stänicke’s Trial Of Hein, which opens this year’s Perspectives programme.”
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