New films by Wim Wenders, Angela Schanelec, Ilker Catak and Sharbanoo Sadat are among six projects supported with a total of €1.23m by the CNC and Germany’s Federal Film Board (FFA), co-production fund at its second session of 2023.
Each provides €3.2m for the fund annually to support co-production and project development by German and French production companies.
A total of €150,000 production support has been awarded to Wenders’ next feature documentary The Secret Of Places (working title) to be shot in 2D and 3D as a long-term “collaborative research project” with the architect Peter Zumthor. It will explore the essence of his life’s work through two ongoing projects, the extension of the Fondation Beyeler near Basel and the new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“No other art, besides dance, needs the third dimension as clearly as architecture,” said Wenders who will be producing the film through his Road Movies with France’s Les Films du Losange and German-Swiss producer-distributor DCM.
Between them, the FFA and CNC have allocated a total of €250,000 production funding for German filmmaker Angela Schanelec’s next feature Thomas Le Fort, a drama centring on a couple reacting to the wife’s infidelity. It will be a majority French production by SBS Productions with Kirill Krasovski’s Berlin-based faktura film as the German minority partner. faktura had been the lead producer of Schanelec’s last feature film Music which had premiered in Competition at the Berlinale last February.
The largest sum handed out at this session - € 350,000 – has been awarded to The Teachers’ Lounge director Ilker Çatak for his next feature Yellow Letters which will be produced by Munich-based if…Productions with France’s Haut et Court and Turkey’s Liman Film and Tyger Film.
Based on a screenplay by Çatak and Ayda Çatak, Yellow Letters tells the story of respected theatre artists in Ankara who lose their jobs overnight due to arbitrary state action and are forced to live in exile with their 13-year-old daughter.
Meanwhile, Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat’s No Good Men, produced by Hamburg-based production house Adomeit Film has received €225,000 for her third feature film collaboration with the production company after Wolf And Sheep and The Orphanage. The comedy, written by Sadat with Mohammad Anwar Hashimi - whose unpublished diaries provided the basis for Sadat’s previous film The Orphanage will be co-produced by La Fabrica Nocturna Cinéma and follows TV camerawoman Naru to find a good man in Kabul and be able to keep her son with her.
And production support totalling €215,000 has been given to Turkish filmmaker Ahmet Necdet Çupur’s drama Pastoral Pathways., set in a repressive political system. The project was presented at this year’s Berlinale Co-Production Market and will be produced as a French majority co-production by Les Films du Poisson with Berlin-based Niko Film and Turkey’s Liman Film as partners.
n addition, €40,000 project development support has been given to Anna Roller’s next project Manatee, following her debut Dead Girls Dancing which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and Filmfest München last month. Manatee will see Roller reunited with Munich-based production outfit Kalekone Film and France’s Totem Atelier.
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