Maren Ade’s Das Zauberwort (which translates as The Magic Word), her first film as director since her 2016 international arthouse hit Toni Erdmann, is among the feature projects to receive a total of €2.2m by Germany’s State Ministry for Culture and Media’s culturally oriented film funding programme at its latest session.
Komplizen Film has received €100,000 for Das Zauberwort, which will centre on a mother who turns her family life upside down with an anarchic and provocative all-out assault.
The company is also being supported with €600,000 in producing funding for Maria Schrader’s Work And Structure, co-written by Schrader with Jan Schimburg. Work And Structure is based on texts from the eponymous autobiographical book by the German writer and painter Wolfgang Herrndorf, who started a blog in March 2010 when he was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour. It was to serve as a work journal, status report and a place for reflection on how he was coping with his illness.
Herrndorf, whose novel ‘Tschick ’ was adapted for the cinema by Fatih Akin in 2016, died by suicide in August 2013 aged 48.
Work And Structure is being coproduced by France’s Haut et Court, triggering further support from the German-French ‘minitraité’ co-production fund, administered by the FFA and the CNC.
Additionally, Arthood Films received €450,000 for Iranian-born director Nader Saeivar’s project Parastoo, about a 40-year exiled Iranian former actress living in Berlin who is caught between two worlds. While trying to save her imprisoned husband in Iran from being re-arrested, she is also faced with a struggle to maintain her personal freedom in Germany. Saeivar has written the script with Maryam K. Badri.
Arthood produced Saeivar’s Hijamat, which made its world premiere in competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival earlier this month.
In addition, €500,000 has been granted to Michael Kalb Filmproduktion for Iranian-German filmmaker and video artist Narges Kalhor’s second feature The Inverted Well. It follows two insomniac women in their mid-50s who are living in widely contrasting worlds until one evening a hole in the ground opens up and catapults them each to the other side of the globe.
This funding session also saw Constantin Filmproduktion receive €400,000 in production funding for German-Kurdish director-producer Hüseyin Tabak for the screen adaptation of influencer Tahsim Durgun’s best-selling semi-autobiographical novel
Mama, Bitte Lern Deutsch, about a child of Turkish immigrants growing up in Germany and his mother’s difficulties in learning the language.
Leipzig-based Reynard Films received €100,000 as the German coproducer of Spanish filmmaker Alba Sotorra’s coming-of-age animated feature Pink Punk Delta. The international coproduction between Spain, Slovakia, Colombia and Chile is led by Sotorra’s own Alba Sotorra outfit. It is about an 11-year-old girl who feels invisible within her family and in her surroundings in the Ebro Delta located in north-eastern Spain.
Finally, Razor Film Produktion has been awarded € 60,00 to develop Leonie Krippendorff’s Merkurkind, following an intersex child’s quest shortly before reaching puberty to find their place in the world during summer holidays spent on the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily.
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