The Italian mafia operations in 1990s Germany will be the focus of Gebrüder Beetz Filmproduktion’s next true crime docuseries, a sequel to Reeperbahn Special Unit 65 which is making its world premiere at the Filmfest Hamburg this week.
The series is set within Hamburg’s Reeperbahn red-light district during the 1980s. The new series - with the working title of Polizeikommando - will cast its net wider to include police operations against organised crime in other German cities such as Munich, Düsseldorf, and Stuttgart as well as the new federal states in former East Germany.
“The first series focused, among other things, on how the US mafia brought gambling and hard drugs to Germany and also looked at corruption within the police and in the world of politics. The second season will follow the Italian mafia as it gains a foothold in both West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” producer Christian Beetz explained. “Germany was the paradise for money laundering at the time.”
Reeperbahn Special Unit 65 is the first documentary series to be invited by Filmfest Hamburg to compete for the special prize for series formats awarded as part of the Hamburg Producers Prize for German Television Productions.
It will be competing against four other series, including Neue Bioskop’s fiction series German Crime Story: Chained which was one of the first two series along with Reeperbahn to be backed by MOIN through a dedicated funding strand for high-end series launched at the end of 2019.
Hamburg funding
Production funding for the new Polizeikommando has been granted by Hamburg’s regional film fund MOIN and the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW. The project will reunite Reeperbahn Special Unit 65’s directors Ina Kessebohm and Carsten Gutschmidt with showrunner Georg Tschurtschenthaler.
Beetz - who produced Netflix’s first German non-fiction original A Perfect Crime in 2020 - confirmed q funding application will be made to the German Motion Picture Fund which supported Reeperbahn Special Unit 65 last year. It was the first time it had backed a documentary series after previously concentrating on high-profile fiction series such as Babylon Berlin, The Queen’s Gambit and 1899.
OneGate Media (formerly known as Studio Hamburg Enterprises) will also serve as a co-producer and international distribution partner on the new project which is set to begin production from the beginning of next year.
Meanwhile, Beetz’s brother Reinhardt, who manages Gebrüder Beetz Filmproduktion’s Hamburg-based operations, is overseeing production of a six-part high-end TV series about the city’s legendary underdog football club FC Pauli.
Filmfest Hamburg’s 2022 programme has also features another production from Gebrüder Beetz Filmproduktion - the German premiere of Aurora’s Sunrise - in the Kaleidoskop sidebar.
The company served as the German co-producer for Inna Sahakyan’s animated documentary which is based on the autobiographical bestseller by the silent movie star Aurora Madriganian and has now been selected by Armenia as its national Oscar entry for the international feature category.
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