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Titus Kreyenberg • Producer, unafilm

Driven by curiosity

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- Turkey remains one of the key destinations in the map of German company unafilm. Seyfi Teoman’s Saints is set to shoot this autumn

“I am constantly driven by pure curiosity when I am choosing my projects,“ says producer Titus Kreyenberg who set up on his own with his company unafilm in 2004. Although he doesn’t have a background of formal training by attending one of Germany’s film schools, Kreyenberg knew “pretty early on that I wanted to work in media, although I didn’t initially know in which area.”

He decided to study at the University of Sussex where he also completed a course in Television Production. The growing economic crisis at the beginning of the 1990s prompted him to return to Germany where he found a post as artistic assistant at the newly founded Academy of Media Arts (KHM). The opportunity to work with several newcomer directors came when he moved to the production house Colonia Media and was given the task of rejuvenating the Der Fahnder series which had always been a mainstay of the public broadcaster ARD’s early evening schedules. “I brought in directors like Martin Eigler, Ed Herzog and Lars Montag who had all come from film school, but didn’t have any experience of working for television,” he explains. “The idea was to work with them on bringing Der Fahnder, so to speak, back to its roots.”

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Over time, Kreyenberg had built up a reputation in the German TV scene as an executive producer working for such production companies as Nostro Film, Odeon Film, Studio Hamburg and Constantin TV, and continued this activity even after he had founded unafilm in 2004 to concentrate on his own projects.

Kreyenberg’s first productions at unafilm saw him working with newcomer directors such as Konstantin Faigle, Erica von Moeller and Carolin Schmitz before he made his first foray into international co-production with Swiss-born Sophie Heldman’s feature debut Colours In The Dark in 2009. “We were working in the same language, so it wasn’t so much of a challenge as a co-production with non-German speaking partners would have been,” he observes.

unafilm’s first real international co-production came with the collaboration with Turkish producers Yamac Okur and Nadir Öperli of Bulut Film on Seyfi Teoman’s Our Grand Despair [+see also:
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, which premiered in the Berlinale’s Competition last year. “We got to know each other through a recommendation from a colleague when we were all at Rotterdam’s CineMart,” Kreyenberg recalls. “It was a very quick meeting, but they gave me a screenplay of Our Grand Despair to read – which I did overnight – and I called the next morning before they left to say that I would come onboard.”

“It was a great experience starting with us working together on the screenplay, the financing and then on the actual shoot and the editing of the film,” he continues, admitting that “it may have got a bit loud between us at times, but it was always constructive!”

The international dimension to unafilm’s activities has seen Kreyenberg become an increasingly regular fixture at various co-production markets and industry gatherings throughout Europe – from Rotterdam’s CineMart through the Paris Projects and Torino Film Lab to Sarajevo’s CineLink and Istanbul’s Meetings on the Bridge.

unafilm’s involvement in Romanian director Adrian Sitaru’s latest feature project Domestic came after meeting the producer Monica Lazurean-Gorgan of 4proof Film who had been attending Sarajevo’s CineLink as part of a delegation of EAVE producers. Kreyenberg was approached at short notice along with France’s Guillaume de Seille of Arizona Films to become production partners on Özcan Alper’s second feature Future Lasts Forever.

Moreover, Turkey will remain one of the key destinations of unafilm’s map in the future: support was given in the first round of the new German-Turkish Co-Development Fund for a renewed collaboration with Bulut Film on Seyfi Teoman’s next feature film Saints which is set to shoot this autumn. “I am very pleased about the commitment from Eva Hubert [of Film- förderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein] and Kirsten Niehuus [of Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg] supporting co-productions with Turkey and initiating the Co-Development Fund,” Kreyenberg enthuses. “A difficult aspect of international projects has been that you often get involved when the screenplay has already been developed, but the idea of such a Co-Development Fund is that you develop a project together and so come together at a much earlier stage. That helps to make the connections so much stronger,” he says.

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