Christian Petzold, Kaouther Ben Hania projects receive backing from Germany’s Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg

Christian Petzold’s anticipated Miroirs No.3 and Kaouther Ben Hania’s epic love story Mimesi are among the 19 projects awarded a total funding of almost €3.5m by Germany’s Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (MBB) at the second funding session of 2024.

Miroirs No.3 will star Paula Beer in her fourth collaboration with Petzold after Transit, Undine and Afire. She will play a young music student who has to restructure her life when her boyfriend dies in a car crash in the countryside.

The film, which is being produced by Petzold’s production company Schramm Film Koerner Weber Kaiser, received €500,000 in production funding from MBB. It had previously been allocated €500,000 by the state ministry for culture and media (BKM) and €30,000 script funding from the German Federal Film Board (FFA).

Ben Hania’s epic love story Mimesis, a German co-production via Heino Deckert’s ma.ja.de Filmproduktion with Tunisia’s Lassaad and Rafik Kilani and France’s Sarah Chazelle and Etienne Ollagnier, of Jour2Fête, received €150.000 from MBB.

Dennis Gansel’s feature update of Robert Harris’ controversial bestselling novel Fatherland, set to star the UK’s Luke Evans, which he has been developing as a project for more than 12 years, was awarded €450,000. The screenplay for the Ufa Fiction production has been written by Matthias Pacht with Mel Layos, G.J. Koll and Martha Hiller.

Meanwhile, David Wnendt has received €80,000 to work on the development of his next feature project Athos 2643 adapted from Nils Westerboer’s bestselling novel of the same name which won the 2023 German Science Fiction Prize. It centres on the investigation by an inquisitor of the death of a monk on one of Neptune’s moons.

Athos 2643 will be produced by the Berlin-based company Seven Elephants, Wnendt’s company with fellow directors Julia von Heinz and Erik Schmitt and producer Fabian Gasmia. 

Further filmmakers supported in the latest round of funding include Robert Schwentke for action thriller Control, starring James McAvoy and Julianne Moore, a collaboration between Studio Babelsberg, Studiocanal and The Picture Company; DoP-director Bernhard Jasper (You Are Wanted, Army Of Thieves) who will helm the fourth outing of the hit family film franchise School Of Magical Animals; and German-born Iranian director Faraz Shariat (No Hard Feelings) who is developing a new feature project AI with the Iranian-American trans-femme filmmaker-musician Sepi Mashiahof.

The single largest amount of €800,000 awarded at this funding session went to the TV series Etty, to be produced by Komplizen Film’s Komplizen Serien and directed by Israeli writer-director Hagai Levi. It is adapted from the diaries of the Dutch author Etty Hillesum who was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz.

• Screen International to partner with The Ankler during Cannes Film Festival