Hamburg’s regional film fund MOIN has secured an additional €10m for its budget for the next two years.
MOIN’s annual budget will rise from its current €15m to €20m for 2025 and 2026 and will be spent in part on more support for Filmfest Hamburg as well as for graduation films by students of Hamburg Media School and the University of Fine Arts HFBK.
The extra spending was announced on Thursday morning (12 Dec) by members of Hamburg’s coalition of the Social Democratic Party and Alliance 90/The Greens when they visited the set of the Norwegian writer-director Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s drama Butterfly which is currently shooting on location in Hamburg.
This co-production between Norway’s MerFilm and the Studio Hamburg Production Group subsidiary Nordfilm, which was presented as a project at the Berlinale Co-Production Market in 2023, had received € 200,000 in production support from MOIN.
“The significant increase in film funding enables us to strengthen the industry in Hamburg and set the course for greater competitiveness and the further development of the film hub in the north,” said Dr. Carsten Brosda, Senator for Culture and Media.
In an allusion to the protracted debate in Berlin about proposed reforms to Germany’s national film funding, MOIN’s CEO Helge Albers pointed out that the additional €10m is “a real ray of hope in the current tense situation in the film industry. We can now place the film hub in a stronger position for the future, promote talent better and bring more feature films with appeal to the north. This will create jobs, support local service providers and give a boost to Hamburg as a hub for international films and series.”
Albers also took the occasion of the set visit to Guttormsen’s film to announce that MOIN plans to raise its profile and presence in Scandinavia in future.
“The five Nordic countries are extremely interesting partners for the North German film industry,” he explained. “As a next step, we are planning a close cooperation in 2025 with the Göterborg Film Festival, the most important industry meeting place in Scandinavia.”
The fund will have a presence at Göteborg’s next edition in January with the screening of several of its supported films, events and a visit by a delegation of producers from Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein with opportunities to attend the Nordic Film Market and TV Drama Vision conference .
Recent productions supported by MOIN include Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun; Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig; Robert Schwentke’s action film Control, starring James McAvoy and Julanne Moore; Julia von Heinz’s Treasure; İlker Çatak’s Yellow Letters; Fatih Akin’s Amrum; and TV series Black Fruit which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last June.
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