18/12/2012 - German producer Martin Heisler looks back at his career in Lichtblick

One might say that fate smiled on Martin Heisler when he was hired by Cologne-based Lichtblick Filmproduktion as a junior producer and production manager for Bastian Günther’s feature debut Autopiloten in 2006. Heisler had spent four years in Cologne working for public broadcaster WDR before taking up his studies in Creative Film & Television Production at the dffb in Berlin.

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“It was obvious that we would shoot in the Ruhr region because Bastian’s story is set there,” Heisler recalls. “Joachim Ortmanns of Lichtblick heard about the project from attending the pitching event at the dffb. The film was backed by broadcaster SWR as part of the ‘Debütim Dritten’ season and received funding from Filmstiftung NRW. We got on so well during this production and became friends, so it was decided to found a sister company – Lichtblick Media in Berlin,” he continues. “The difference is that the Berlin company is just me and a producer where as in Cologne they have many more people with the areas divided up between the two partners, Joachim Ortmanns for fiction features and Carl-Ludwig Rettinger for docs. Nevertheless, we are doing both,” Heisler explains.

“Bastian’s second film Big Game Hunting was another major step forward from the previously smaller productions we had made, with a budget of 1.7 million Euros,” Heisler adds. “And we had a star like Ulrich Tukur who is never off the screen. Further more, there were the logistical challenges of shooting in two separate blocks and on two continents – in Germany and Texas.”

While there is not much of a film industry in Houston, Heisler knew about the vibrant filmmaking scene in nearby Austin and managed through a personal contact to get in touch with Anne Walker McBay, the producer of films by Richard Linklater. “We met up with her, she liked the script and was a real blessing for the project as a service producer.”

With David Sieveking, Heisler first produced the riveting documentary David Wants to Fly, which was the opening film of the Panorama Dokumente section of the Berlinale in 2010 and subsequently screened at over 30 film festivals around the globe. They continued their working relationship with Sieveking’s second documentary for Lichtblick Media, Forget Me Not, which is “characterized by unaffected sympathy and loving affection, with a constant focus on the people rather than on the disease.”  Heisler received a lot of interest from distributors after the premiere and has also sold the film to Artur Liebhart’s Against Gravity in Poland, who distributed Sieveking’s first film. Germany’s Farbfilm will release the film in the cinemas at the end of January 2013 – the same time as Look Now! – after a German premiere at the Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animated Film in October. Meanwhile, Against Gravity will release it in Poland next summer after premiering the film at the Planete Doc Review Film Festival in Warsaw. “

While much of Lichtblick Media’s time will now be devoted to coordinating the releases of Sieveking and Günther’s films, the Berlin outfit also has projects nearing completion, raising the financing or going through the stage of development.

On the one hand, Heisler has Sandra Kaudelka’s documentary I Will Not Lose which is currently in post-production and focuses on former professional athletes in the ex-GDR and how they could survive such a merciless system. The next project to go into production next summer should be HFF Babelsberg graduate Andreas Pieper’s Additional Time.

In addition, he has two documentaries at the financing stage – Thorsten Trimpop’s The New Normal following five people whose lives were transformed by the tsunami disaster in Japan, which received this year’s highly respected Gerd Ruge Stipendium; and a minority participation in Finnish director Antti Haase’s Lordi - The Monsterboy about a heavy metal rocker living like an eternal teenager.

The Finnish project came to Heisler’s attention during his attendance of the EAVE producers training program this year. “My friend Erwin M. Schmidt, a producer at Neue Road Movies, recommended that I apply as a participant without a project,” Heisler explains. “I have Roshanak Behesht Nedjad [of Flying Moon] as my team leader and we have the course’s final session held in Amsterdam with the so-called ‘DMs’ [decision makers from broadcasting companies, film funding agencies, distributors and sales agents).”

“I have been really impressed at EAVE that you have a group of young producers from all over Europe who are keen to work together and they don’t harbour any feelings of jealousy,” he says. “You can speak quite openly about your feelings of uncertainty or weakness and it all remains within this circle. That’s what I like is that everyone is treated seriously and listened to.”