One of last year’s biggest festival successes was a German documentary, Maria Speth’s Mr Bachmann And His Class, which won the Berlin Festival audience award. German documentaries made by revered auteurs like Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders are feted all over the world.
And films about German subjects continue to excite cinema goers. For example, the new Amazon film about tennis star Boris Becker, Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker, screening in Berlinale Special Gala, is one of the hot tickets in next week’s Berlin Film Festival.
Even so, as Simone Baumann, the managing director of promotional agency German Films, points out, these are tough times for documentary in the German theatrical marketplace.
“Worldwide, we have the situation that there are less releases of documentaries theatrically. If films do get released theatrically, maybe it’s a really famous director or a film about brands that are super-famous. All the other films, usually they don’t make it to the big screen…the pandemic was speeding up a process that was going on anyway,” Baumann says about docs’ struggle for space in German cinemas.
The reluctance of audiences to come back to theatres to see documentary is only part of the problem. Another concern is the financial side of things. “To release films in theatres today, you need more money for P&A [and] marketing than before Covid. You need [to make] more effort to find your audience,” Baumann notes. “The financial effort is really, really big and you might not recoup that.”
Nonetheless, German docs are very well represented at this year’s Berlinale. Titles such as Steffi Niederzoll’s Seven Winters in Tehran; Lea Najjar’s Kash Kash; Lonely Oaks directed by Fabiana Fragale, Kilian Kuhlendahl and Jens Mühlhoff, and Nuclear Nomads directed by Kilian Armando Friedrich and Tizian Stromp Zargari are all showcased in the Perspectives Deutsches Kino section. (This foregrounds work from younger German filmmakers to an international audience).
German documentaries are also dotted throughout other sections of the festival, for example veteran auteur’s Volker Koepp’s Leaving And Staying and Luís Alejandro Yero’s Calls From Moscow, are both in the Forum.
“It’s a really diverse programme representing the broad potential of German documentary filmmaking – different generations, people from different backgrounds dealing with very different subjects,” Baumann says of the grab-bag of titles that are Berlinale-bound.
The Berlin Festival is also screening minority German co-productions like Ukrainian director Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies. This tells the story of the Russian involvement in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in July 2014. (Munich-based TRIMAFILM was co-producer alongside Ukrainian outfit, Babylon 13).
Germans Films itself is not active in the domestic market. Its job is to promote the films internationally. It has various programmes which support international distributors who pick up German titles (including documentary). German Films also supports sales agents who have German docs in their line-ups.
“Before Covid, we had some really, really successful titles which did very well abroad in theatres,” Baumann says, citing examples like Jörg Adolph’s The Hidden Life Of Trees which sold all over the world.
Now, though, the applications for international distribution support for German documentaries has slowed down markedly. “It means probably they [international distributors] didn’t buy the films for theatrical.”
In spite of buyers’ “hesitancy” to acquire docs for theatrical releasing, there are causes for optimism. Distributors are sometimes still acquiring docs which they can then sell on to broadcasters and streamers. The best docs also now tend to have very lengthy festival runs, screening at anything from 30 to 90 separate events around the world.
Last month, Baumann visited International Film Festival Rotterdam and was very heartened to see screenings of German films like André Siegers’ La empresa completely sold out. The appetite for the documentaries, then, is still there.
In order to find an audience outside festivals, documentary makers are increasingly going on tour with their films, taking them from city to city and having Q&As. This is expensive to do properly, but ensures that the films are noticed.
Baumann also speaks of the example of Mr Bachmann, a film that is 217 minutes long and portrays a school teacher in a town in North Hesse. “Surprisingly, it did a proper number of sales even to territories that I wouldn’t have thought would release it because it is four hours. It takes two slots in the cinema. But it was really very popular.” She adds that although this may seem like a very German story, its themes “are so universal…it triggers questions [about] migration, different cultural backgrounds, different social groups.” It helped, too, that it was able to use the Berlinale as a domestic launch pad.
The German Films boss warns that such stand-out films don’t come along that often. “The problem in Germany is the financing. We have tons of documentaries made for television. Many don’t travel a lot. They are very German, adapted for our TV…The theatrical distributors, they don’t invest in documentaries. They write you a letter of intent but you don’t get the minimum guarantee for documentary.”
Another challenge is that the German funding system is “very bureaucratic” and not always adaptable to creative documentaries which may take years to complete. That’s why new majority German documentaries are in short supply in pitching and financing forums like CPH:DOX.The German Films boss believes the best policy is always to support quality. “I think a good film is a good film,” Baumann reflects on why certain German docs still cut through, in spite of the difficult market conditions, “I think we should support good films and talented people. It doesn’t matter whether they make a fiction, an animation or a documentary at the end of the day.”
