Karsten Stöter’s Germany-based ROW Pictures, the producer of Emily Atef’s Berlin competition title Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, has unveiled a slate of features from Natja Brunckhorst, Markus Schleinzer and Eliza Petkova.
Brunckhorst’s second feature, Zwei zu Eins, is set to go into production this summer at locations in Central Germany and North Rhine-Westphalia. It will be co-produced by the Lübeck-based arm of zischlermann filmproduktion with backing from broadcasters ZDF and ARTE as well as MDM, the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW and BKM.
Based on a true story which played out in East Germany’s final months before Germany’s monetary union and reunification in 1990, the comedy follows three friends’ discovery of East German banknotes stashed in underground tunnels near Halberstadt and their plan to bring the money back into circulation.
Ronald Zehrfeld - who portrays the Swiss author Max Frisch in Margarethe von Trotta’s competition title Ingeborg Bachmann, Sandra Hüller, one of the stars of Frauke Finsterwalder’s Sisi & I, and Max Riemelt (The Matrix Resurrections) have been cast as the three friends.
Meanwhile, Stöter is the partner in a 50:50 Austrian-German co-production with Johannes Schubert of Schubert Film on Rose, Markus Schleinzer’s third feature film after Michael (2011) and Angelo (2018).
The director, who can be seen at this year’s Berlinale appearing as Emperor Franz Joseph I in Frauke Finsterwalder’s Sisi & I, describes Rose as “a story about a woman in the early 17th century, who is disguised as a man and wants to be a good citizen at any cost.”
Shooting of the film, which will see Schleinzer reunited with Angelo screenwriter Alexander Brom, is scheduled for 2024.
Next year will also see ROW Pictures producing Eliza Petkova’s next feature, The Worker (Der Arbeiter), which centres on a Bulgarian man who comes to Germany searching for happiness and a better life, but finds himself in a grey area characterised by exploitation, illegality, homelessness and forms of modern slavery.
Veselka Kiryakova’s Sofia-based Red Carpet Films is to serve as the Bulgarian co-producer, with Nicolas Kronauer’s Darmstadt-based Fourmat Film also onboard as a local German partner.
Petkova’s previous feature A Fish Swimming Upside Down premiered in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino in 2020 and she received the Kompagnon Fellowship at the 2021 Berlinale to develop the screenplay for The Worker.
In addition, Stöter is making his first foray into the world of series with the development of an adaptation of Domenico Müllensiefen’s autobiographical debut novel Aus unseren Feuern from 2022 about a lost generation growing up in precarious circumstances in Leipzig in the early 2000s.
ROW Pictures was previously known as Rohfilm Factory until the end of 2022 with credits on such films as Emily Atef’s multi-award-winning 3 Days In Quiberon and Gunnar Vikene’s War Sailor.
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