An Italian film from Germany premiered last Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival: “The Girl with the Leica” tells the story of the photographer Gerda Taro, who sets off from Paris to fight the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Together with her partner Robert Capa, who has since become much more famous, she tries to accompany the Republic's fight against fascism. The Berlin company Komplizen, among others, is involved in the co-production, which received a strong boost in 2016 with the film “Toni Erdmann” by Maren Ade - the director also acts as a producer and partner in Komplizen.
“The Girl with the Leica” received film funding from the Central German Media Fund, which is reflected in the narrative in flashbacks to 1932, when Gerda Taro (Emilia Schüle) lived in Leipzig. The end of the Weimar Republic, the large-scale constellation of a fight against right-wing regimes, the survival of democracy, the commitment of art, all of these are topics that make Marina Marazzi's film appear contemporary. A young ensemble, from which Aaron Altaras stands out in the role of the idol Robert Capa, creates identification potential for a concerned contemporary audience.
The Central German Media Funding organizes a federal contribution for the federal states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia to the large, intricate system that is commonly referred to as film funding in Germany. If you look it up a little, you will find information that the MDM will report no fewer than 196 individual items in 2025, including 500,000 euros for Pawel Pawlikowski's “Fatherland” (released in cinemas this week), which is partly set in Weimar, or 5,000 euros for a single further training in the area of intimacy coordination. “The Girl with the Leica” received 275,000 euros.
Whatever the outcome of the elections and later the formation of a government in Saxony-Anhalt, the MDM will not be the focus, but it is part of the cultural policy that the AfD has identified as a campaign issue. Films are an outstanding medium for a society's self-understanding.
The MDM is represented in Venice with two other titles. The corresponding press release prose is one of the constitutive routines of the company. Supporters proudly announce when works that also owe their support appear at festivals, when they do well in the cinema, and of course when they come close to winning prizes. The funders also engage in film criticism, but at a stage in which the works are first conceived for realization, which then often ends up on the desks of those responsible, who are usually permanently employed (or their appointed committees).
It is this point in particular that always causes discussions, although the system is constructed in such a way that a rejection can always be thought of as not having to be decisive: the creative people can still knock on the door in Munich if they were not considered in Berlin. You then just have to write a Bavarian substitute plot into the script. The slightly Kafkaesque logic is reproduced at the European level, where numerous “pots” are available. In good cases, this leads to intelligent and talented people networking between Lisbon and Kiev (the company Komplizen is an excellent example of this too).
In other cases, it leads to ambivalent feedback: The Austrian director Marie Kreuzer had such great success with her drama “Corsage” (about Elisabeth of Austria, better known as Empress Sisi) that her project “Gentle Monster” (about a woman who discovers that her husband is accused of pedocrime) was in demand all over Europe. The film (released in cinemas on September 17th) now acts on one level as an index of this European cooperation, in which every financial contribution must be recognized by a plot element: locations in Austria and France, Jella Haase plays a Munich policewoman, Catherine Deneuve has a supporting role. In this way, a subtle drama can at the same time become a film funding baroque.
If there were a political discussion about film funding in Germany, which is rarely the case, one would have to ask the question that precedes all executive action: What is the public sector needed for, and which areas can reproduce themselves autonomously? This would require a typology of films that is actually not difficult to create. Obviously, there are films with an explicitly artistic claim that have their first (and often only) place at the major festivals and which could therefore be described as festival films (in order not to put too much emphasis on the aspect of art, which is more difficult to conceptualize). They are characterized by complex perspectives and exploit the possibilities of the medium.
There are also more or less sophisticated but essentially conventional commercial films for which the term arthouse has become established and which are not completely, but in large areas congruent with, the everyday case of European subsidized cinemas. The third type is commercial cinema per se, which is primarily associated with American blockbusters, but which now also predominates in the People's Republic of China - the authoritarian communist regime has significantly withdrawn from the area of festival cinema, which can almost be seen as an epochal process (for the small area of cinema).
Film funding in Germany, with its many channels and strategies, has a regulatory peculiarity that it treats the three types of film as if there were only one. Here's an example: It was recently announced that the comedy “Extrawurst” had reached two million visitors. This was proudly reported not least by the numerous institutions that donated money for a project with a cast of stars (from Christoph Maria Herbst to Hape Kerkeling) and a successful stage template.
In a political climate in which there is a constant search for areas in which “bureaucracy can be reduced” or from which “the state can withdraw”, “Extrawurst” would be an ideal example: a film that could have been released into the wild, into free competition. But the opposite is the case: numerous sponsors have thrown their weight behind the project - including those from the BKM, which should actually pay attention to artistic aspects.
It would be interesting if one could take a closer look at the evaluation figures for “Extrawurst” in a year or two. Because then you could also talk about the goals that Germany is pursuing with its film funding - strictly speaking, the singular is misleading in this case. The fact that countries want to “make an appearance”, also with employment effects and ideally in a film that sells all over the world after an Oscar and then runs on Netflix for years, is an obvious and unavoidable motive.
But the German community needs to clarify what it expects to gain from spending money on a film in which people in a tennis club in the provinces argue about what should be on the grill. Does anyone in Indonesia (one of the new partner countries) want to see this? Does this bring soft power to Brazil? Or is a provincial Germany simply having provincial fun with its little weaknesses?
Film funding (in this respect the singular again) is a bit like healthcare - only fortunately with significantly smaller amounts. It creates a knot that cannot be cut. All relevant laws in the Federal Republic were basically written by the industry; in the case of cinema people, it is primarily the producers, many of whom have largely gotten rid of a core element of their activity: risk. Film funding cannot be reformed because it has secured itself through its now seemingly natural complexity and because it is successful at first glance - see the three films in Venice these days. But film funding cannot be reformed because its everyday operations are increasingly abolishing the differentiations on which its original motive was actually based: to create something that the market does not provide.
This is how a series like “Unfamiliar” on Netflix can become an achievement, when in reality it is a completely interchangeable product with Berlin as a setting attached to it like a brand suffix. The American platforms that Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer wants to turn into sources of money are also already available as a skimming point for the dozens of goods that arise from film funding that is not specifically qualified in terms of content.
You can also put it another way: artistic success is a redundancy effect in the system that is currently maintained in Germany in the area of films, series and visual art. It happens, but it has more to do with the individual educational stories that many people in Germany still write, often with many disappointments from other people who, through professional chance, have brought to crucial positions in film funding.
“The Girl with the Leica” also has many aspects of a symptom formation of subsidized cinema. You can clearly see the treatment of the film, which is technically well made, which in the film funding opens the door to the lengthy process of script funding, development funding, production funding and usually also distribution funding: European anti-fascism with a female heroic figure, a “today’s” material with a dash of “Babylon Berlin”. According to the criteria that are currently circulating among film funders in Germany, the film will be seen as a success.
But in order for the supreme discipline of cinema, the idiosyncratic artistic film (or a similar series), to gain a stronger presence in Germany, a directional decision is required: a significant portion of the income that Wolfram Weimer hopes to generate from the American streamers should be pooled and qualified in a federal offensive in favor of unusual talent. As long as that is not the case, film funding can simply be allocated to the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
