28/09/2012 - Zum Goldenen Lamm Filmproduktion: from school films to mainstream cinema

The seeds for the founding of the production company Zum Goldenen Lamm Filmproduktion were probably sown on the set of a graduation film from the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, which was shooting in Berlin. “I was the production manager and Rüdiger was our knight in shining armor who we flew up to Berlin to troubleshoot,” recalls Stefan Sporbert, one half of the Ludwigsburg-based production outfit with Rüdiger Heinze, which was officially launched in August 2008. “Then Rüdiger was producing Such Mich Nivcht for the Film Academy and brought me on as a production manager,” he continues. “That was the first production where we worked together for the whole duration of the shoot.”

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They both then went their separate ways after this production, Sporbert continuing with his studies in Berlin and Heinze also writing some scripts for the public broadcaster ProSieben. But things changed when Marc Rensing, a friend and fellow student of Heinze’s from the Film Academy, asked him to write the screenplay for the feature film Parkour.

“I also wanted to produce it, so during the financing stage, I called up Stefan because I needed someone to head up the production and asked him whether he was interested in setting up a production company with me,” Heinze remembers.

“This call came just at the point where I had finished my BA in Business Studies in Berlin and was then thinking about what would come next,” Sporbert adds. “I let myself be taken on this adventure, but it’s all gone well so far!”

While they are open to all genres, their first productions have all been conveniently brought under the label of drama: starting with Rensing’s Parkour and continuing through Michael Dreher’s Die Zwei Lebe Des Daniel Shore to Friederike Jehn’s Summer Outside.

“That has a lot to do with the fact that we have been working with first-time filmmakers,” Heinze suggests. “However, in the next couple of years, we want to move more into the mainstream: we are producing a romantic comedy TV movie for SAT.1 next year and are also preparing a mainstream comedy for the big screen. At the same time, we want to keep to our commitment to absolute arthouse, i.e. the kind of films which are invited to Acategory film festivals,” he continues.

While other German producers are constantly traveling around the nation’s film academies to spot new exciting talents, Sporbert and Heinze have had the good fortune that it is the filmmakers who seek them out. “Perhaps it’s because we have built a good reputation as producers of debuts,” Sporbert says. And so it was that Rick Ostermann, who worked for many years as an AD for Lars Kraume and Matthias Glasner, approached the company with the script for his feature debut Wolfskinder, while Marc Brummund met Heinze during an edition of the Max Ophüls Prize Film Festival in Saarbrücken and they came into conversation about his project Freistatt.

Scripted by Annette Friedmann, Wolfskinder centers on a woman in her 50s who is diagnosed with a dangerous disease, but decides against any treatment as she wanted to fulfill a long-cherished childhood dream to swim the English Channel.

Moreover, a busy year for Sporbert and Heinze will come to a close in December with the start of principal photography for Brummund’s Freistatt, which won the Emden Screenplay Prize at this year’s Filmfest Emden-Norderney at the beginning of June.

Freistatt in the title refers to one of the toughest reform schools in Germany in the 1970s and the film’s action centers on a boy who ends up here after being disowned by his parents. The filmmakers have received support from the regional Diocese and will be able to shoot in the original reformatory.