Films by Jan Ole Gerster and Sebastian Schipper are among seven projects awarded a total of €2.5m by the German government’s cultural film funding programme at its latest session.
The funding committee allocated €600,000 to Berlin-based Kundschafter Filmproduktion for Gerster’s feature project German Angst, which will see him reunited with actor Tom Schilling, who headlined his award-winning tragicomedy Oh Boy (aka A Coffee in Berlin) in 2012.
Schilling plays a journalist who is planning a new beginning with his family in the sticks of Brandenburg, but gradually loses himself in a maelstrom of paranoid fears and conspiracy theories.
Gerster’s most recent film was Islands, starring Sam Riley, Stacy Martin and Jack Farthing, which premiered at 2025 Berlinale.
A total of €600,000 was also awarded to Iconoclast Films for Schipper’s sixth feature Toter Mann, about two brothers planning a murder after having suffered sexual abuse as children at the hands of their foster father. The screenplay was written by Eike Schulz, the co-writer of Schipper’s one-take heist thriller Victoria from 2015
In addition, €600,000 was granted to Kiss Kiss Wolf, X Filme Creative Pool’s production of novelist Helene Hegemann’s second feature as a director after her 2015 debut with the adaptation of her novel Axolotl Overkill.
Set in 1986 in the ORWO film factory in former East Germany, Kiss Kiss Wolf follows two female workers who come to the attention of the Stasi after secretly filming lesbian sex films at the factory.
This funding session also saw Munich-based if.,. Productions, producer of this year’s Golden Bear winner Yellow Letters, receive €500,000 in production funding for Mongolian-born writer-director-actress Uisenma Borchu’s third feature project Fidschi.
Borchu’s screenplay, set in a small East German town in the 1990s, centres on two young girls with Vietnamese and Mongolian roots who try to find their place in a society characterised by prejudice. Their friendship is then put to the test when one of them falls in love with a young neo-Nazi.
Meanwhile, Kirill Krasovski’s Magdeburg-based Blue Monticola Film was awarded €100,000 in project development support for Russian-born writer-director Vladimir Beck’s feature film Little Explosions, which follows two gay Russian men’s decision to escape from Moscow to Berlin after they are separated from one of their sons by an inadvertent revelation.
Krasovski, whose production of Angela Schanelec’s My Wife Cries was in Competition at this year’s Berlinale, is participating in the ACE 35 Producers programme with Little Explosions.
Kosovar writer-director-producer Visar Morina received €95,000 in funding to work on the development of his fourth feature film, the tragic love story Wherever You Are, I Leave You The Keys (working title), which his company, Vicky Bane, will produce after handling his previous feature, the Sundance 2026 award-winner Shame and Money.
Support from the German government’s cultural film funding programme, which is administered by the German Federal Film Fund (FFA) on behalf of the Minister of State for Culture and Media (BKM), comes in the form of a non-repayable grant and can be up to €1m for the production of a project.
Meanwhile, streaming platform Netflix and the German producers’ association PROG are collaborating on a new initiative called East German Perspectives in Film and Series’ to support rising talents from the eastern half of the country to develop authentic storylines based on their own experiences without falling back on stereotypes.
Six creative teams will be selected by an independent jury to each receive a grant of € 10,000 along with access to advice from experts and pitching training as part of a four-month programme set to launch this autumn.
The programme will then be rounded off with a pitching event during the 2027 Berlinale, when teams will present their project ideas to potential production and financing partners.
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