Budding Filmmakers and Professional Training in Germany

Then graduates in film studies from all over the country vie for the First Steps Awards. Worth a grand total of €72,000, the honours for the best final projects are conferred by three celebrity-studded juries in five categories, including full-length feature, documentary, short and promotional films. At the closing bash, the award-winners and other candidates party – and network – with big names from every domain of the German motion picture industry.

Born six years ago, First Steps is the brainchild of producers Bernd Eichinger (Constantin Film) and Nico Hofmann (teamWorx). Together with Stefan Aust (Spiegel TV), commercial TV broadcaster Sat 1 and Mercedes Benz, they created a high-profile platform for the new generation of filmmakers. The event, Eichinger remarks, has established itself as a highlight in Germany’s annual film calendar. “We try to bring together the thousand key players in the industry and the best young German-language filmmakers,” explains Nico Hofmann to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “In the days following First Steps we usually receive three to four hundred calls at teamWorx from editors and producers all over the country requesting video copies of the prize-winners, the nominees and indeed all the final projects from German film schools.”

An effective initiative that has enabled many a prize-winner and nominee to make a name for him or herself. Like Stefan Krohmer, whose first full-length TV feature, Ende der Saison, won four Grimme Awards in gold. Sven Taddiken’s Getting my Brother Laid (Mein Bruder der Vampir) was screened at a score of festivals and won almost as many prizes. The New York Times acclaimed Neco Celic’s debut, Alltag, as a revelation of one of the most exciting German directorial talents. Achim von Borries and Hendrik Handloegten collaborated on the screenplay of Good Bye, Lenin!, among other things, and the lead, Daniel Brühl, had been discovered in Hans Weingartner’s The White Sound (Das weisse Rauschen, which won a First Steps Award in the year 2000.

Though First Steps covers the whole spectrum of senior productions and the prizes are not tied to specific projects, other awards single out special categories or professions or impose certain requirements on the recipients. Presented at the film festival in Hamburg, the Studio Hamburg Nachwuchspreis, for example, goes to the best directors, screenplays and producers of feature films. The Förderpreis bester Absolventenfilm, conferred by the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf in Babelsberg together with the Gesellschaft zur Wahrnehmung von Film- und Fernsehrechten (a royalty collecting society for film and television) and Radio Berlin Brandenburg, goes to the best feature and documentary works by film school graduates. The Bayerischer Filmpreis pays tribute to individual artistic achievements, including those of newcomers to the industry.

Other awards are for special professional groups. The Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Kurzfilmpreis honours up-and-coming producers and directors for cinema-quality shorts. The femme totale-Kamerapreis is for young camerawomen, the Boje Buck Drehbuchpreis for the best unproduced screenplay by a film school graduate, and the Gerd Ruge Projektstipendium for the best young documentary-makers, to name just a few.

In addition to all these awards, a host of festivals provide a forum for public exposure. They range from the Duisburger Filmwoche for documentaries and the Internationales Leipziger Festival for documentary and animated films to the world-renowned Internationale Kurzfilmtage for shorts in Oberhausen.

But the prime showcases for youngblood pictures in German are the Filmfestival Max Ophüls in Saarbrücken und the Internationale Hofer Filmtage. Whereas young filmmakers’ first and second feature and short works are shown in Saarbrücken – as well as documentaries beginning in 2004 –, only premieres are presented at the oldest forum for new German feature and short films in Hof. At SehSüchte, the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf in Babelsberg, Potsdam, presents international student films of every genre and length. And now that it has been uncoupled from Munich’s Filmwochen, the long-established Internationales Festival der Filmhochschulen in Munich has made a comeback.

Young filmmakers are featured even at the Berlinale – especially in the German cinema section, Perspektive deutsches Kino, which was created six years ago and has been a hit with the public. But Germany’s foremost festival seeks to promote young filmmakers from abroad, too: its so-called Talent Campus, which was set up in 2003 and has been very successful, brings together future filmmakers from all over the world.