EXCLUSIVE: Production is underway in Germany on the first two German Dogma25 features, directed by Ilker Catak and Helene Hegemann.
Screen can reveal first looks at the two titles below. TrustNordisk will launch the projects to the international market at this week’s American Film Market in LA (November 10-15).
Catak’s currently untitled film reunites the filmmaker with Leonie Benesch, who starred in his Oscar-nominated 2023 breakthrough The Teachers’ Lounge. His Dogma film follows two women and a man searching for happiness in present-day Berlin. One woman struggles with her desire to have children; the other wonders if her life might have been happier with another man; while her son attempts to find a new perspective in life while getting over his wife’s death.
Meral Perin, Oguz Akinci and German star Hanna Schygulla are alongside Benesch in the cast. The film is co-written by Catak and Johannes Duncker, and produced by Germany’s if… Productions in co-production with X-Filme Creative Pool and Zentropa Germany. Support comes from ZDF, ARTE, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, MOIN Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein and X Verleih, with X Verleih handling German distribution.
Hegemann is in production on her Dogma title Battlefield, in which the lives of an amateur fighter, a philosophy graduate working as a pole dancer, and a 10-year-old boy who has lost his mother all intersect across an MMA gym, a nightclub and a dying German village. Campbell Caspary, River Roux, Balthazar Gyan Alexis Kuppuswamy, Samuel Schneider, Lavinia Wilson and Bernhard Schutz lead the cast.
Battlefield is written and directed by Hegemann, and co-written by Caspary and Roux. It is produced by X-Filme Creative Pool in co-production with Zentropa Germany and with support from ZDF, ARTE, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, MOIN Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein and X Verleih.
Catak and Hegemann are two of five filmmakers to sign up to the German edition of the Dogma25 initiative, alongside Kurdwin Ayub, Nora Fingscheidt and Tom Tykwer. It launched at Cannes this year, one year after the Danish initiative at Cannes 2025 and 31 years after the original Dogme 95 movement.
Isabella Eklof is in post-production on the first Danish Dogma25 title Mr. Nawashi starring Noomi Rapace, with Trine Dyrholm, Christian Slater and Dree Hemingway leading Jesper Just’s title Incidents Of Intimacy. Former BFI Filmmaking Funds director Mia Bays is currently building the model for a UK version of the initiative.
No comments yet