The Match Factory to handle sales on Schwochow's third feature

The Match Factory is to handle international sales on Christian Schwochow’s third feature film Campfire (Lagerfeuer), which will begin shooting this autumn.

The co-production between Christoph Friedel and Claudia Steffen’s Cologne-based Terz Filmproduktion and Berlin production houses zero one and Ö Filmproduktion sees Schwochow reunited with German Shooting Star 2012 Anna Maria Mühe, who appeared in his first two features November Child and Cracks In The Shell, and Barbara’s Ronald Zehrfeld who was also in the latter film.

Schwochow’s mother Heide has adapted Julia Franck’s 2003 novel by herself this time after having collaborated with her son on his previous two films and the 2008 children’s film Marta und der fliegende Großvater. Lagerfeuer centres on a mother who left the German Democratic Republic with her son in 1978 and their feelings of uncertainty and transition in their new life at the Emergency Reception Centre for refugees in the West Berlin borough of Marienfelde. Schwochow’s screenplay was also nominated for this year’s German Screenplay Award.

In reminiscences for a book to celebrate the 20th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009, Franck wrote that when her mother and siblings arrived in Marienfelde in autumn 1978, “the West appeared to be anything but golden, sunny and free. The centre was surrounded by a high security fence topped with barbed wire; the inmates were guarded around the clock (for our own protection). We spent our first week at the centre in quarantine until such time as it was established that we had no infectious diseases.”

Lagerfeuer has been backed so far by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and Film- und Medienstiftung NRW as well as public broadcasters WDR, SWR, RBB, and Arte. It is the second co-production between zero one and Terz Filmproduktion after the documentary Gerhard Richter Painting which won the Best Documentary Lola last weekend and is also handled by The Match Factory.

At the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival, The Match Factory has two competition films in its lineup: Sergei Loznitsa’s second fiction feature In The Fog (V Tumane) and Mexican Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux which marks the Cologne-based sales agent’s fourth foray into being a co-producer.

In addition, The Match Factory will be selling Fatih Akin’s documentary Polluting Paradise (Müll im Garten Eden) which has been invited to Cannes to be presented in the progamme of Special Screenings.