German producers board Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman's next project

Henning Kamm, who will represent Germany at Cannes next month as its Producer on the Move, and business partner Fabian Gasmia at Hamburg-based Detailfilm are to reunite with Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman for his next feature project.

Kamm and Gasmia were co-producers on Ataman’s last feature film The Lamb (Kuzu), which had its world premiere at the Berlinale’s Panorama last February and won the CICAE Art Cinema Award.

Detailfilm will now serve as the co-producer on Ataman’s Hilil, Feza And Other Planets, which received support from the German-Turkish Co-Production Co-Development Fund at this month’s Meetings on the Bridge co-production market in Istanbul.

Moreover, Berlin-based producer Titus Kreyenberg of Unafilm confirmed to ScreenDaily at this week’s Visions du Réel documentary festival in Nyon that the Co-Development Fund had also awarded funding to Jessica Krummacher’s feature debut, Birth Of Purple.

The film, whose storyline is set in Turkey, will be co-produced by Nadir Öperli’s Bulut Film. Krummacher’s graduation film, Totem, was screened in Venice Critics Week in 2011.

Kreyenberg, who has frequently worked with Turkey on such films as Our Grand Despair by the late Seyfi Teoman and Future Lasts Forever by Özcan Alper, is one of the co-producers of the omnibus project The Bridges of Sarajevo, which will have a Special Screening in Cannes next month. He produced the episode directed by Angela Schanelec with whom he is also developing a new feature project. 

Another long-term collaboration is between Bettina Brokemper and Johannes Rexin of the Cologne-based production house Heimatfilm and the Turkish writer-director/producer Semih Kaplanoglu.

Heimatfilm served as German partner on the second two parts of Kaplanoglu’s Yusuf trilogy - Milk (2008) and Honey (Bal) (2010) -, the latter part winning the Golden Bear and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Berlinale in 2010.

Heimatfilm is now a partner with the director’s own company Kaplan Film on his latest feature, Grain, an apocalyptic science fiction drama in a world ravaged by war and environmental pollution. Part of the shoot will take place in North Rhine-Westphalia, and production support came from Film- und Medienstiftung NRW and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. The Match Factory is handling international sales.

Coming full circle, one of the co-producers on Heimatfilm’s production of Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt  was Amour Fou Luxembourg, the producer of Jessica Hausner’s new feature Amour Fou which will have its world premiere in Un Certain Regard next month.