Titus Kreyenberg

"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 initally know in which area."

In fact, he had gained various kinds of practical experience of working in production by the time he decided to found his own production company, beginning by working on set design for theaters in Berlin and then handling production design for various graduation films at Berlin’s German Film & Television Academy (dffb) in the 1980s.

Kreyenberg then decided to go abroad and studied at the University of Sussex near Brighton where he also completed a course in Television Production. This knowledge put him in good stead when he stayed on in the UK after postgraduate studies and entered the world of production, being responsible, among other things, for the Writers in Conversation series at London’s ICA and filming such luminaries as Harold Pinter, Toni Morrison and Ian McEwan and later also such filmmakers as Derek Jarman.

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) in Cologne.

"That was quite a formative experience for me at the KHM because I was able to work so closely with people like Dominik Graf and Horst Königstein," Kreyenberg recalls. "And it also gave me insight into the new young talents coming through."

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."

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.

The fact that he has moved between fiction feature films and documentaries is all down to his abiding curiosity about the world around him. "I only decide on the basis of the subject matter whether the film is a documentary or feature film," he says, adding that "all of my films have a social relevance. This may perhaps not always be obviously political, but it should say something about our society, for example, 'Satte Farben vor Schwarz' ('Colours in the Dark') looks at how people cope with their everyday lives, 'Die Ausbildung' ('The Education') focuses on the issue of employment, and 'Halbschatten' asks how someone defines them selves as an artist. More over, the documentaries 'Schönheit' ('Beauty') and 'Peak' are striking in their view of society."

Kreyenberg’s first productions at unafilm saw him working with newcomer directors such as Konstantin Faigle ("Die große Depression" / "The Great Depression"), Erica von Moeller ("Leben mit Hannah" / "Hannah") and Carolin Schmitz ("Benidorm") before he made his first foray into international co-production with Swiss-born Sophie Heldman’s feature debut "Satte Farben vor Schwarz", starring Bruno Ganz and Senta Berger, 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 "Unsere große Verzweiflung" ("Our Grand Despair"), 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 "Unsere große Verzweiflung" 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! That’s the reason why I like working on international co-productions because the directors have another kind of passion and urgency."

The door to international co-production opened to Kreyenberg after he participated in the Ateliers du Cinéma Européen (ACE) producers training program with "Satte Farben vor Schwarz" as a project. "Since my participation in ACE, 50% of what I do is international and I have profited a lot from the ACE network," he explains. "Last year, I made the documentary "Peak", co-produced with Italy’s Movimento Film, and Nicolas Wackerbarth’s "Halbschatten", co-produced with Les Films d’Antoine from France, both with ACE members from my year’s group.”

The international dimension to unafilm’s activities has therefore 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 film "Future Lasts Forever", which won awards for Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Music as well as the "Siyad" Turkish Film Critic Association’s Prize and the Yilmaz Güney Award at the International Golden Boll Film Festival in Turkey’s Adana last September.

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 Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein] and Kirsten Niehuus [of Medien board 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.

Meanwhile, 2012 will once more see unafilm represented at the Berlinale – this time with Ann-Kristin Reyels’ new film "Formentera" screening in the Forum after the company had Seyfi Teoman’s "Unsere große verzweiflung" in last year’s Competition and Dirk Lütter’s "Die Ausbildung" in the Perspectives German Cinema sidebar where it won the French-German Dialogue en perspective prize in 2011. As Kreyenberg explains, "Formentera"  has a very special place in his heart "because with Ann I have found a way of working as I had always imagined it should be: a language, sometimes a different grammar, a goal and a framework. The shoot with a 12-man team was the best I have ever experienced: concentrated, focused and having lots of fun in the process."

Author: Martin Blaney