New films by Karim Ainouz, Talal Derki and Arian Vazirdafzari are among projects receiving support from Germany’s national cultural film funding programme in its latest funding rounds.
Ainouz’s Wild Boys is one of eight fiction film screenplays which were each awarded grants of €50,000 by a jury including directors Saralisa Volm and Behrooz Karamizade, screenwriter Heide Schwochow and producer Elena von Saucken.
With writer-director Florian Gärtner co-writing, Wild Boys is set in Berlin in 1933 and centres on an anarchic queer gang of young hustlers and street kids living in the forests on the edge of the capital. When the Nazis start tightening the noose, the gang attempt one last major break-in of the villa of a high-ranking SA leader.
Ainouz’s Rosebush Pruning world premiered in competition earlier this year at the Berlinale, while Motel Destino and Firebrand played in Cannes competition in 2024 and 2023 respectively.
A total of over €600,000 in non-repayable grants have been awarded to 20 screenplays and treatments in the fifth and sixth rounds of funding this year. So far, 23 screenplays have received grants of €50,000 each, and there have been 38 grants of €17,500 each for the treatments of fiction films or documentaries.
Other fiction feature screenplays supported include the dramas Erzähl Es Noch Einmal by Iranian-born Arian Vazirdaftari, Another Twinflower by Chinese filmmaker Ruan Lan-Xi and modern fairytale Frau Aus Brot by Russian-born Anna Kruglova (aka Anja Kreis).
Vazirdaftari’s debut feature The Night Arezou Disappeared, which was shot underground in Iran, had its world premiere at last week’s International Hof Film Festival, while Ruan’s graduation film The Plant From The Canaries premiered in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present competition last year. Kruglova’s debut feature The Alienated screened in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition in 2024.
Meanwhile, grants of €17,500 each were allocated to 12 treatments, including for six documentaries by such filmmakers as Syrian-born filmmakers Talal Derki and Raaed Al Kour and Mexico’s Miguel Buenrostro.
Last Women Standing by Derki, whose 2017 film Of Fathers And Sons won the German Film Awards best documentary and was nominated for an Oscar, focuses on the last 1,500 fighters of the Women’s Protection Units YPJ which was part of the Syrian Democratic Forces during the civil war but which is now not allowed to be part of the Syrian army by the country’s new conservative government.
Al Kour’s Darb is a cinematic quest to find answers to the fate of his friend Youssef who was arrested and disappeared 14 years ago while also honouring the more than 300,000 people who went missing during the Assad regime.
Buenrostro’s documentary essay Por Saleá traces the transatlantic journey of music between Spain and the Americas through songs, singers and instrument-makers whose traditions have spanned the Atlantic for five centuries.
Meanwhile, the six treatments of fiction features include the Istanbul-set drama Mit Offenen Augen Schlafen by Eva Trobisch, whose Something Very Special premiered in the Berlinale’s 2026 Competition, and Berlin-based Chinese filmmaker Viv Li’s road movie Sun Haze set in northwest China.
Last year, the jury-based cultural film funding programme, which is administered by the German Federal Film Board (FFA) on behalf of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), supported the development of screenplays or treatments by such filmmakers as Christian Petzold, Maria Speth, Ayse Polat, Jan-Ole Gerster, Fabian Stumm, Muschirf Shekh Zeyn and Agnieszka Powarska with grants totalling over € 2.1m.
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