Budding Filmmakers and Professional Training in Germany

In Germany, the filmmaking business, cultural institutions and educational establishments are campaigning for film education to become a subject in its own right in school syllabi.More ...

For ten years now the First Steps Award has been bestowed on up-and-coming, young talent who make films in the German language.More ...

Since 2008 Matthijs Wouter Knol has been in charge of the Berlinale Talent Campus at the Berlin International Film Festival. In an interview with goethe.de he looks back at the Berlinale 2009 and takes stock.More ...

No other film school in Germany can pride itself in having so many Oscar winners and Oscar nominees among its alumni. What is the secret of its success?More ...

Of the total of 15,000 German actors, roughly 2,000 have an ally in the tough battle for lucrative roles – their agentMore ...

"Music in film offers the chance to tap into another creative level"More ...

The key qualifications for this profession include a fascination with film, music – and legal nicetiesMore ...

All cinema fans know their photographs. Even before a film flickers onto the screen, they are to be found in film magazines, feuilletons, display boxes at cinemas and on posters. The Goethe-Institut asked two experienced still photographers to stand in front of the camera for a change.More ...

They had already been working as film critics in their home country. Then they had been invited to join the Talent Press Campus at the Berlin International Film Festival, the workshop for young film critics, organised by Berlinale, Goethe-Institut and FIPRESCI. This first international festival experience has boosted the career of many of the participants. Three examples.More ...

No screenplay, no film. This applies to the silver-screen epic as well as to the never-ending series on television. Nevertheless, screenwriters in Germany usually lead a shadowy existence, in contrast to actors and directors. More ...

With their buildings and interiors, they compose the pictures that create the atmosphere of a film. Film setting - a profession, which in Germany is still taken up by people switching from other career paths or taking a course of studies.More ...

There are over 80 film festivals in Germany – and a number of prizes awarded independently of those festivals. Some of them specially target young filmmakers with a view to advancing their careers and helping them gain a foothold in the industry – along with some public exposure.More ...

Once you’ve finished film school, learned the craft – what then? Well, you won’t get anywhere in the movie industry without commitment, patience and stick-to-it-iveness. After graduation, budding screenplay writers, cameramen and directors take the plunge into an industry that knows no job security.More ...

Film school has almost entirely supplanted the old method of “learning by doing” in Germany. But access to the sets of movie and TV productions in Germany is not restricted, as yet, to film school graduates. More ...

Student projects at German film schools are not shot simply to gather dust in the archives. On the contrary, German film schools are open for the industry in which the upcoming generation will have to pass muster, and they screen the works produced by students each year. That enables young directors, dramatists, screenplay writers and cameramen to contact and collaborate with the movie industry at the outset of their careers. More ...

Germany leads Europe in terms of the range of programmes it offers in film studies. What began with a handful of film schools in the 1960s burgeoned into an impressive array of programmes, particularly in the ’90s. The expansion was triggered by the growing number of commercial TV stations with a growing demand for well-trained recruits.More ...