Budding Filmmakers and Professional Training in Germany

Some people make it without going to film school, but taking the academic path is even better. Students at Germany’s renowned film schools enjoy excellent training in both the theory and practice of filmmaking.

Of course – you can start a brilliant film career as a cable carrier and do without all that studying at film school and still become a successful producer, cameraman, screenwriter or director later. Michael “Bully” Herbig, one of Germany’s most popular directors whose most recent hit Wickie und die starken Männer (Vicki The Viking) drew almost five million people into the cinemas, loves to tell his story with great gusto of how in his younger years he applied to the film school in Munich, but was turned down. In the meantime “Bully” has walked off with prizes and awards for all of the five films he has made so far.

So some people do actually make it without going to film school. And Bully Herbig is quite certainly not the only one. Nevertheless, careers like his are not the norm. A film school is really the right place to be for anybody interested in becoming a producer or director in the film business. For example, the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (HFF) München (University of Television and Film in Munich) where – to name but a few of its famous alumni – people like the successful producer, Bernd Eichinger or the Oscar-winning duo, Max Wiedemann and Quirin Berg (The Lives of Others), along with authors and directors like Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Million Dollar Hotel, Don’t Come Knocking, Palermo Shooting), Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), Hans-Christian Schmid (Requiem, Sturm/The Tribunal) and Oscar laureate Caroline Link (Annaluise and Anton) all pored over their books there.

Nearly two dozen film schools to choose from

Alongside the more than a dozen private institutes there is a total of six genuine state-run or semi-state-run film schools in Germany, at which students can gain an academic degree. As well as the University of Television and Film in Munich there is also the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, the Film Academy of Baden-Württemberg, the Hamburg Media School, the Konrad Wolf Academy of Film and Television (Potsdam-Babelsberg) and the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. According to the index of international film school associations, CILECT, the non-profit-making International Film School in Cologne (ifs) has to be included, too.

All of these places of learning offer multi-structured courses –not only for direction (of both documentary and feature films), but also in subjects like screenwriting, production and camera, often accompanied by communication and media sciences. The famous “Animation Institute” at the Film Academy of Baden-Württemberg also deserves a mention.

“Going to film school gave me the encouragement I needed”

Interdisciplinarity is important for filmmakers. This is also one of the reasons why going to film school is such a good idea. “While I was studying to become a director, I also found out all about camerawork, sound and production management. The course I did in actor direction turned out to be really important for my later career,” says Seyhan Derin, a graduate of the HFF in Munich and now a director living in Berlin (Between the Stars). One of the films she made as part of her course , the documentary Ben Annemin Kiziyim (I Am My Mother’s Daughter), was shown in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival in 1996 and one year later was broadcast on Bavarian television. “Even today all the things I learned at the HFF still give me the encouragement I need, among other things for the daily work I do making TV series,” says Derin.

One thing should of course not be forgotten - the places on these courses that are among the most cost-consuming of all of the academic courses available at German universities, are – for the students – free of charge, making them not only very much sought after, but also very scarce. The students only have to pay the obligatory, yet comparatively low, study fees that all students in the meantime now have to pay at most German universities. “Every year about 200 young people apply for a place on the course in film direction, but in the end we can only take nine,” reports Andreas Gruber, professor of direction, dramatic composition and production for feature and television films at HFF in Munich. This strict selection process, in which the candidates have to pass both a practical and an oral exam, helps the candidates to get off to a good start later when they start their careers.

“Thrown in at the deep end in New York”

Martin Menzel went down a completely different road. Back in 1999, when he was 20, he made a short film, a James-Bond parody, Blumen lügen nicht (Flowers Don’t Lie) and attracted the attention of TV. Later this enabled him to start a three-year apprenticeship to become a media designer at the studios of Germany’s 2nd public TV channel (ZDF) in Magdeburg. While he was there he also made a few more short films, among them the award-winning Fahrerflucht (Run Over). In his mid-twenties he applied to a few film schools, but was turned down for, as he suspects, “being too old and having too much experience”.

In 2009 he went to New York for a year to study there at the film academy. He says himself that although the course cost 34,000 dollars, it was worth every cent – it was being in such a “pressure situation” that taught him all he knows. Almost all of his fellow students were also not Americans and they were all “thrown in at the deep end”. They had to make eight films of their own in one year, as well as help out with the projects their course-mates were working on. Menzel is now back in Germany working on the final version of his short film “The Vanishing” that he shot while he was in New York.

Learning how to write a screenplay at the Institute of German Literature

Another very busy person is Cathy de Haan – a dramatic advisor who, since 2008, has been lecturing on the German Creative Writing Program at the Institute of German Literature (DLL) at the University of Leipzig. She teaches screenwriting, an optional course that according to her enjoys great popularity. In collaboration with the Leipzig cultural association called Ostpol de Haan has also created a program in further training called Ansichtssache. In October 2009 six DLL screenwriting students, selected by a jury of independent judges, worked on joint short film projects in cooperation with a group of students from the Leon Schiller National School of Film, TV and Theatre in the Polish town of Lodz (the year before it was Kiev). The six films that were made are all to be shown at the International Short Film Festival in Dresden in April 2010 and they all attest to an artistic and extremely fruitful synergism between the two countries.