21/08/2008

"From the outset, we tried to be really topical and socially relevant," says Clementina Hegewisch about her collaboration with Laurens Straub in the production company NextFilm.

The company was initially launched by Straub’s then wife, film director Pia Frankenberg. When Straub joined the company, their first production together was Hermine Huntgeburth's The Trio, which was released by Warner Bros. in 1999.

Straub and Frankenberg parted ways during the development of the company's second project, Jochen Kuhn's Fisimatenten. Hegewisch joined NextFilm as a new partner when Fisimatenten was released in the cinemas in 2000.

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Hegewisch explains, "Laurens and I had known one another and been friends since 1984 when I moved to Munich. It made sense to me to team up with him because with NextFilm he already had a structure in place – but only on the condition that the company would operate from Berlin!". The first production the two developed and produced together was Winfried Bonengel's Fuehrer Ex. The film's world premiere was in the Official Competition at Venice in 2002, followed by festival screenings in Toronto, São Paulo, and Tallinn, among others.

"We then did two documentaries followed by our next feature Max und Moritz Reloaded, which marked the beginning of a close cooperation with Kinowelt, significant for both Straub and NextFilm. “In the last two years of his life, Laurens worked as writer and co-director on Reverse Shot – Rebellion of the Filmmakers, a documentary produced by Rainer Koelmel and Kinowelt International about the history of Filmverlag der Autoren. Kinowelt also handled world sales for the documentary Coffee Beans for a Life which I produced in 2005."

"We were in the middle of developing our next feature about the Berliner Bank scandal [dir: Ulrich Stein] when Laurens was diagnosed with cancer," she continues. "It really stopped us in our tracks and the company was in limbo from that point on. Nothing much was done until his death in April 2007."

"I thought for quite a long time about what I should do, and then decided to carry on by myself." Connie Walther's Schattenwelt was the next project after that and, being a co-production, it helped her a lot in making that decision. "The project was a stroke of luck. Michael Jungfleisch of Gambit Film, who raised a major part of the financing, asked me if I would be interested in taking over production of the film. I was very attracted to the project because it dealt with the effects of political events on my generation as I was growing up and with which I was very familiar.

Hegewisch particularly enjoys initiating film ideas and working closely with screenwriters and directors in the development phase rather than just acquiring the rights to completed screenplays. At the same time, she is still working on projects originally set in motion by her late partner. A case in point is Ulrich Stein's planned film Das Milliardenspiel (working title) about the Berliner Bank scandal. "In actual fact, Uli is a documentary filmmaker, but he has worked on a lot of reenactments in the past couple of years for films, for example, about Peter Graf and the German secret service BND," Hegewisch explains. "I see it as both a political thriller and a feature film which is extremely close to reality."

Moreover, 2009 could see NextFilm embarking on its first English-language international co-production with an adaptation of Helga Hegewisch's novel Die Totenwaescherin, to be directed by veteran Dutch filmmaker Ben Verbong from a screenplay by Hardi Sturm.

"When my mother's novel was translated into Dutch I gave Ben a copy and, as soon as he read it, he asked if I had ever thought of making it into a film," Hegewisch recalls. "The novel actually covers five generations of women undertakers, but we have chosen one figure for a story set in 1850 at the beginning of the industrialization of Germany."

"It is a wonderful and heartbreaking love story, but not only that. It is also a story about strength and believing in your own abilities and consequently about emancipation. Visually, Ben and I are thinking about Tess and Girl with a Pearl Earring she notes, pointing out that she "would like the film to be shot in English as an international co-production because I truly think it’s a global story.”