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Uwe Dierks • Producer, Boomtown Media

Focus on telling good stories

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“The documentary film has been important for us, but, above all, we are interested in telling good stories,” says Uwe Dierks, one half of Boomtown Media which he founded with partner Thomas Grube in 1999.

“We had know each other for some time before we established our first company, Grube & Dierks, to producer and direct together,” Dierks recalls. “We have now been working together for the past 15 years and have similar ideas about how to tell stories and are interested in the same topics.” As he points out, Boomtown productions such as Rhythm Is it! and Trip to Asia “show that we set great store on a film’s dramaturgy. If you want to compete with the other big films in the cinemas, you need to have the right images and technical quality, but, primarily, it is the quality of the story that counts.”

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While Boomtown was first and foremost a home for Grube to develop his projects in an atmosphere of creative freedom and independence, the company has already been open to taking on the projects by other filmmakers. “It was always our goal to produce other people’s film as well as for economic reasons because you can’t have the whole burden of a company resting on the shoulder’s of one person,” Dierks explains.

“And so, we are currently producing Marcus Vetter’s Cinema Jenin and will also be involved in his next film,” he continues. “We want to intensify this approach with just a few people. It is also about having a common view of things: the filmmakers may be all quite different, but what we have in common us that we want audiences to take pleasure in a positive outlook rather than showing them only dark, difficult and problematic things. We are already surrounded by enough of that because you only have to turn on the news to see the latest catastrophe.”

Looking back at the last 10 years of the German documentary scene, Dierks admits that there have been various up and downs in the fortunes of the documentary format in the cinemas. When Rhythm Is It was released in 2004, few documentaries were making it into the German cinemas or making much impact with audiences. The film’s subsequent success brought the theatrical documentary back into the spotlight and the public’s attention. “It is not that there isn’t an audience for these films or that critics and cinema-owners are not well-disposed towards documentaries,” Dierks stresses. “But the larger number of films coming into the cinema these days makes it harder for smaller films – and that includes documentaries – to get the necessary visibility. These films need to stay longer in the cinemas in order to generate all important word-of-mouth.”

While the German home is naturally the first address for Boomtown’s productions, they have looked consciously for subjects for their films that have a universal form of expression or approach that might cross borders. Moreover, the company acquired a better insight into the changing trends in the international market after setting up its in-house sales arm Boomtown Media International in 2005 to handle to the international distribution of its output. “This enables us to see very clearly the countries where people like the kind of stories we want to tell them. And it can also be very useful for the financing of new projects,” Dierks explains.

But Boomtown Media isn’t just about documentaries. “Our goal was always to make fiction films as well,” Dierks declares. “This will be our next step and we have two projects being developed by Thomas at the moment: one of them has evolved out of a previous documentary and another story idea comes from something he has had in his head for some time.”

However, this step to fiction does not mean that Boomtown will abandon its lean structure and expand to take new staff. “We will be looking to draw on the know-how and experience of fellow producers and story editors, which give us both more time for development,” Dierks says. “Thomas is writing both screenplays in English and the scale of both films means that they will have to be structured as international co-productions”.

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