Sarah Duve-Schmid

Source: Mathias Bothor/MBB

Sarah Duve-Schmid

Unifrance’s executive director Daniela Elstner and İlker Çatak, the Oscar-nominated director ofThe Teachers’ Lounge, are among 18 industry professionals recruited to the new film funding selection committee at Germany’s Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (MBB).

The executives have been recruited by Sarah Duve-Schmid, the new CEO of MBB, to help decide on which film and TV projects the €41m fund should support.

The creation of a selection committee marks a departure for MMB. Previouly all funding decisions on film and TV series projects were taken solely by the fund’s CEO without any recourse to a committee.

This so-called “Intendantenprinzip” was the unique feature of MBB’s funding structure when it was launched in 1994 as Filmboard Berlin-Brandenburg. All other regional film funds in Germany work with selection committees to make their funding decisions

This major change to MBB’s funding process was heralded last year as a move to greater transparency in the funding decisions when the fund started looking for a successor to Kirsten Niehuus, who stepped down this summer.

MBB has an annual budget of around € 41m to support film, series and new media.

The first funding decisions by these two committees will be made next January.

Elstner and Çatak are in a pool of experts drawn from the four fields of creative/drama, production/financing, distribution and broadcasting, who will be selected on a rotating basis to serve on the funding committee for each funding session.

The creative/drama group includes Çatak as well as Turbokultur’s David Hadda, producer of series The Doubters, writer-director Mariko Minoguchi, who recently wrapped shooting on her second feature The Other Side, screenwriter Laila Stieler, regular collaborator with director Andreas Dresen on such films as From Hilde, With Love and Gundermann, and writer Martina Zöllner.

The production/financing group includes producers such as Maze Pictures’ Philipp Kreuzer, Ulysses Films’ Emely Christians and Construction Film’s Julia Rappold as well as Filmfest Hamburg’s director Malika Rabahallah and Dr. Andreas Bareiss, artistic and managing director at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

Meanwhile, Elstner is joined in the distribution group of experts by Andreas Fink, director of screen content/head of film buying for the Cineplex Deutschland cinema chain, Björn Hoffmann, managing shareholder of distributor Pandora Film, and Johanna Pfeiffer, VP head of marketing for Germany, Switzerland and Austria at The Walt Disney Company.

In addition, broadcasters’ perspectives on the submitted projects will be given by executives from local TV channel rbb (Kerstin Freels), ZDF (Solveig Cornelisen), RTL (Hauke Bartel) and ProSiebenSat1 (Dr. Stefan Gärtner).

At the same time, committee members for MBB’s New Media funding strand includes Christian Asanger, VP entertainment at Sky Deutschland, multimedia/VR designer Thi Minh Binh Herbst and actress Julia Kratz.

The latest instalment of the Hunger Games franchise, Sunrise On The Reaping, Volker Schlöndorff’s Visitation and Pawel Pawlikowski’s 1949 were among the projects backed by the MBB in its most recent funding session in June.

 

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