Features to be directed by Radu Jude, Hong Khao and Maryam Zaree are among the projects that have received support from Germany’s Frankfurt-based regional film fund Hessen Film & Medien.
Jude’s Heia, Heia Safari, about a German art student whose research into the history of a German prisoner-of-war camp established in Romania in 1917 for African colonial soldiers leads to unexpected turmoil at her university, has received €400,000 via producer Jippie Film.
The screenplay was written by Jude in collaboration with producer-writer-director Heleen Gerritsen, who took over from Rainer Rother as the head of the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin last summer.
Berlin-based One Two Films has received €400,000 for Cambodian-born, UK-based writer-director Khaou’s third feature, The Ugly One, an adaptation of the play of the same name by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg.
Khaou came to international attention in 2014 with his debut feature Lilting, starring Ben Whishaw.
Furthermore, Komplizen Film has received €410,000 production funding for Iranian-born actress-writer-director Zaree’s fiction directorial debut, the coming-of-age tragicomedy Opfer, which is scheduled to shoot this summer.
Zaree’s directorial debut, the 2019 documentary Born In Evin, explored the violent circumstances surrounding her birth in 1983 in Tehran’s Evin, one of the most infamous political prisons in the world.
Among the other projects to receive support at this funding session was Label Noir’s production of Emmett Till - German History X (working title), co-directed by Lara-Sophie Milagro and Dela Dabulamanzi and co-produced by Jippie Film.
The film/theatre hybrid project is based on the true story of the black teenager Emmett Till, who was lynched by white racists in August 1955, linking US history with developments in contemporary Germany and elsewhere around the globe.
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