Two very different films produced by Hamburg-based Tamtam Film are playing at Filmfest Hamburg this year. Kerstin Polte’s Highly Explosive (Blindgänger) explores the impact of an unexploded World War II bomb on Hamburg residents, while Danish filmmaker Charlotte Sieling’s Way Home is about a father travelling to war-torn Syria to find his ISIS fighter son.
The premieres cap a busy period for the Tamtam co-founders Andrea Schütte and Dirk Decker, who are in the midst of shooting Kai Stänicke’s debut feature Der Heimatlose and have a number of projects in postproduction.
Schütte and Decker, who established Tamtam Film in 2012 after previously working for X Filme and Riva Film respectively, are reaping the benefits of having concentrated on the development of new projects during the pandemic lockdown.
Way Home follows in the company’s tradition of serving as the German partner on productions by their Danish neighbours such as Kasper Torsting’s In Love and War and Samonou A. Sahlstrom’s In Your Arms.
Meanwhile Highly Explosive is the result of the impact of Swiss-born Polte’s debut film, Wer Hat Eigentlich Die Liebe Erfunden?, a road trip between a grandmother and granddaughter, had on the producers.
“We were impressed by how diverse and inclusive that film’s story was and that Kerstin’s approach to filmmaking corresponded with the kind of stories and films we want to make.” Schütte explain. “She was open to working in a very collaborative way to involve all of the cast and crew.”
Tamtam Film brought Switzerland’s Catpics Pictures onboard as co-producer on Highly Explosive after they had previously partnered on 2022 documentary Don’t Worry About India. The cast is headed by Anne Ratte-Polle, Haley Louise Jones and Karl Markovics.
Tamtam and Polte are now planning further projects together. The director is working with Bineta Hansen on the development of the queer series Alaska Canada, which is described by Decker as “a love story with musical elements”, and another series project with Julia C. Kaiser entitled Land Between The Seas. The later centres on the founding of a rural women’s commune in the 1920s.
This expansion into series by Tamtam began in 2023 with the five-part queer mystery comedy Brüt by Hamburg Art Academy HFBK graduates Marian Frestühler and Oliver Bassemir for local public broadcaster NDR..
Anne Solá Ferrer, former VP of German fiction at ProSiebenSat.1 and director of local productions for television for Warner Bros. Entertainment, has now been hired to oversee the series slate for the company.
Shift to Eastern Europe
Among Tamtam films in post are documentaries Sternenbrücke by Christian Hornung about the Hamburg hospice of the same name and The Wheel by three exiled Russian filmmakers Denis Shabaev, Tamara Dondurey and Maria Shalaeva about teenage refugees from Russia coming to terms with a new life in the West.
Also in post is Russian-born Nastia Korkia’s coming of age story Short Summer, produced with France’s Totem Films and Serbia’s Art&Popcorn at locations in Belgrade and the mining town of Bor in eastern Serbia, and Steffen Goldkamp’s drama Der Optimismus about the challenges faced by a young delinquent after completing a juvenile prison sentence.
“We used to have a strong focus on Scandinavia, but now there’s a slight shift to Eastern Europe following the success with our documentary Garagenvolk by Nataliya Yefimkina which had its premiere at the Berlinale in 2020,” Schütte explains.
“An example of this new direction is shown by the project Legacy by the Belarussian director Aliaksei Paluyan whose debut feature documentary Courage was shown at the Berlinale in 2021.”
Legacy - which will be Paluyan’s first fiction film - is structured as a Germany -Poland-Lithuania co-production and was one of the projects selected for this year’s TorinoFilmLab’s Feature Lab training programme. Set in Minsk in 2000, his screenplay centres on a family who finds themselves at opposite ends of a power struggle dating back to the Soviet era.
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