Netflix and Amazon Studios are among the backers of a new German programme entitled NewMotion to promote greater diversity in the nation’s film industry. It was officially launched at the Explorer Conference at Filmfest Hamburg this month.
The programme is the brainchild of producers Roshanak “Rosh” Khodabakhsh (Port au Prince Film und Kultur Produktion) and Jorgo Narjes (X Filme Creative Pool) in cooperation with the Producers Alliance Initiative for Qualification (PAIQ).
“A central element of this initiative is a shadowing programme giving on-the-job training where you follow one person around for a few days and get to learn their jobs,” Narjes explained. “If you are interested in lighting, you would shadow a gaffer or electrician on the set to get an insight into what their job entails.”
“Our goal is diversity and inclusion, so we will be targeting people from marginalised and other underrepresented communities,” Khodabakhsh added. “We are not excluding anyone from our programme, but we do have a special focus because, if there is no focus, there won’t be any change.”
Narjes emphasised that participants will be helped to find onward employment. “For example, if you had been shadowing a costume designer, we’d look at the right way to continue in this department by starting an apprenticeship or tailoring training.”
NewMotion is also establishing a database platform to give an overview of all the internships, apprenticeships and traineeships available for anyone who wants to start out in the film industry.
“We want to target those people who are already interested in the film industry as well those who aren’t so aware of how many jobs there actually are in this industry,” Khodabakhsh explained.
The programme has received financial support from the federal ministry for economic affairs and climate action (BMWK), the federal commissioner for culture and the media (BKM) and the German Federal Film Board (FFA).
In total, the programme’s backers are contributing up to €2.2m in support for an initial three-year-period.
The seeds were sown when the two producers t met while working on the shoot of Jan Schomburg’s romantic comedy The Big Other (aka Divine) in Rome for X Filme Creative Pool.
“We spent the next three years developing the concept for the initiative and finding the financing,” Khodabakhsh recalled. “We have a project team now in place so we will be keeping our day jobs.”
A graduate in creative producing from the internationale filmschule (ifs) in Cologne, Iranian-born Khodabakhsh joined Port au Prince at the beginning of March 2023 as a producer and executive board member. She had spent three years at producer-distributor DCM Pictures where she was a producer on such projects as the ARD comedy series Almania.
She had previously freelanced as a production coordinator and production manager on such productions as the Netflix series Sense8, X Filme’s Babylon Berlin, and Fatih Akin’s 2019 Berlinale competition film The Golden Glove.
German-Greek Narjes, a graduate of studies in film production at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Goldsmiths College in London, joined X Filme in 2018 where he has been involved in the production of the first German Netflix film Isi & Ossi and the drama series Wild Republic, among others.
He has recently been producing the anthology series Zeit Verbrechen, based on the successful Zeit podcast on criminal cases, for Paramount+ with Jan Bonny, Helene Hegemann, Faraz Shariat, and Mariko Minoguchi as directors of the four films, and will now be one of the producers from X Filme for Agnieszka Holland’s next feature project Franz about the life of novelist Franz Kafka.
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