Directors and producers: Film funding: Volker Schlöndorff sounds the alarm

Star director Volker Schlöndorff is sounding the alarm ahead of the Bundestag’s decision on future film funding. If the plans don’t go through parliament on Thursday, even successful filmmakers would go bankrupt, Schlöndorff told the German Press Agency. “You could just throw your hands over your head.”

The current Film Funding Act (FFG) expires at the end of the year. If it is not renewed, the so-called film levy could no longer be collected from users of productions such as cinemas, video industries, online providers or broadcasters. Then the funding pot would no longer be filled and there would be a gap in the financing of German film projects from January.

“There’s a promise”

But approval of the funding law alone is not enough, added Schlöndorff. The volume of film sales has declined, partly because of the cinema crisis. “There is a promise, I hope that they keep it, that they will increase the German development fund by 30 million. These are all ridiculous sums in relation to such a federal budget, of course, but it is essential for the survival of our economy.”

Because the majorities are shaky after the end of the traffic light coalition, Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) recently appealed to the MPs. Without film funding, many productions could move abroad, she warned in November. A comprehensive reform is of existential importance for Germany as a film location.

With tax advantages to Prague or Paris

Schlöndorff sees it that way too. Other European countries also offer major tax advantages and thus attract filming to Prague, Rome or Paris. “They offer 30 to 40 percent tax breaks for the productions that shoot there – and for us, zero,” said the director of film classics such as “The Tin Drum” or “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum.”

For large productions, this amounts to millions, he added. “That’s why Studio Babelsberg has been empty for two years. And the same goes for Bavaria in Munich and Studio Hamburg and the studios in Cologne.”

Schlöndorff said he personally wrote to Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose constituency is in Potsdam. Germany needs similar tax models. Roth planned that too. But so far the project has not been approved by the cabinet, the Bundestag or the Bundesrat. Because there is no federal budget, leeway is very limited.

A third element of the funding is considered to have no chance in the short term before the federal election because it would have to be registered with the EU: an obligation for streaming services to reinvest part of their profits generated in Germany here.

With Jenny Erpenbeck in Masuria?

Schlöndorff said that he himself had “failed with two projects.” One is his announced film about Antonio Vivaldi, the other is a film adaptation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s book “Visitation”. “I wrote a very nice script with her, I have great actors, Lars Eidinger, Martina Gedeck and others,” said the 85-year-old. But: “You can’t get any financing together.”

The story takes place on the Märkisches Meer in Brandenburg, but without German funding he has to see whether he can shoot the film on the Masurian lakes in Poland. “But that’s absurd because it’s such a Berlin-Märkische film.”