DFFB stands for the German Film and Television Academy Berlin
Aside from their Berlinale Panel on the Perspectives of Young Filmmakers, DFFB had one of the most fun parties of the festival as the school’s director Ben Gibson and the staff mingled with film students and young filmmakers from around the world.
Berlinale Panel on the perspectives of young filmmakers covered such issues as:
What are the possibilities for up-and-coming producers to establish themselves independently on the market beyond the first and second films? What are the biggest obstacles? What do the young people’s promotion strategies of the different actors do? Which changes are necessary? And last but not least: How important is the offspring for the future of the German film industry and for German film?
The panel engaged in dialogue about the current status quo and exchanged perspectives, and also developed ideas that could give young talent the opportunities to shape the industry in the future creatively.
The DFFB party was much better than seeing another non-saleable film. Even as the festival is a showcase of films, the European Film Market requires such festival films to be saleable in order for it to continue to bring in revenues and ultimately to find success with the public paying audiences.
Hopefully students are being taught more than how to make a movie but also how to think creatively about targeting the public which is ultimately their market and will determine whether they make a third and fourth film and whether they have a sustainable career.
What caught my eye the most at this party and at EFM in generl was the large number of Asians, and in particular young Asian women, who are entering the film business itself. London-based Millie ZHOU who produces and conducts workshops on the film business is currently working at Trinity Film, a U.K. distribution company of Asian cinema. She has also worked at Dogwoof on the U.K. distribution of documentaries, including Academy nominated Free Solo and RBG. At the same time, she is a graduate entrepreneur of Plus One Films sponsored by University College London, initiating and organizing film education programs on film business (the value chain), entertainment law and film curation and education. “We just delivered the Film Value Chain Executive Progam in Berlin.”
Millie introduced me to Vivian Ying, who based in New York and working with a new international sales agent, Parallax Films. I had just met the head of international sales for Parallax in Bangladesh and again in Berlin. Liuying CAO is a very sharp young woman and working with agents in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Beijing and Shanghai, they are poised to become valuable members of the newly emeging international sales circle of executives.
Parallax Films is a boutique international film sales and distribution company, a subsidiary of Midnight Blur Films, specializing in the worldwide distribution of quality films and publicity at international film festivals and working closely with filmmakers, and providing them with international market exposure and festival opportunities.
Millie and her friends were hanging out with Alex Deleon, a perpatetic and always entertaining film critic often seen in Berlin. He is also a major contributor to SydneysBuzz during the Berlinale and throughout the year.
Alex C. Deleon was born without benefit of wedlock into a Yiddish speaking immigrant family from Russia. He learned English primarily from movies and comic books. He became a film critic by telling his grandmother, who spoke no English, the entire plot of the movies he saw at Saturday matinees (Such as Geronimo!) in Yiddish. Although he remains a fluent speaker of Yiddish to this day he renounces all connection with Judaism and considers Jewishness to be a Birth Defect. He is now an honorary Armenian and resides in Yerevan. He thinks movies are a trivial pursuit but enjoys writing about them as writing is his favorite form of physical exercise.
Why was there such activity at this particular party?
DFFB is radical to its roots (which is redundent since radical means roots: from late Latin radicalis, from Latin radix, radic- ‘root’.) Its beginning came after more than a decade of planning. On September 17, 1966, the mayor of Berlin, Willi Brandt, solemnly opened the German Film and Television Academy Berlin as the first film school in West Germany. Artistic director was the renowned documentary filmmaker Erwin Leiser. In the first year full-time lecturers were Ulrich Gregor (film history and founder of the Forum section of the Belinale) and Peter Lilienthal (directing). Among the students of the first year were such names such as Wolfgang Petersen, Helke Sander, Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky and Holger Meins. One is missing: Rainer Werner Fassbinder was rejected by the Admissions Committee!
In the student-led movements in the late 60s, the students of DFFB created the ongoing reputation as Germany's most political film school. In May 1968, it was occupied by a group of students and renamed for a short time as it sported a red flag. In November 1968, conflict escalated between the students and the directorate and 18 students were dismissed without notice and banned from the building; after the show of solidarity by the lecturers, the artistic director Erwin Leiser resigned. Politicians were ready to irradicate the newly opened academy.
But thanks to the diplomatic skills of Heinz Rathsack - who remained in office until his death in 1989 - things continued. The following decade was marked by political filmmaking. The feature films of the "Berlin School of Workers' Film" by students and graduates made political documentaries and some of the first feminist films of the Federal Republic.
In 1979, for the first time since its inception more women than men were attending, and filmmakers like Ute Aurand, Lily Grote, Bärbel Freund, Ulrike Pfeiffer, Irina Hoppe or Ilona Baltrusch brought in new and above all experimental filmmaking.
Modern dance, the experimental-first-year-films by Christoph Dreher and Heiner Mühlenbrock, broke open the culture of punk and new wave at DFFB. Nick Cave appeared in several student films and occasionally lived in the same factory floor as Dreher and Mühlenbrock. Countless experimental film and video works emerged and slowly a renewed interest in the feature film reawakened with slacker films and a renewed ambition to enter the commercial film and television business for the first time since its beginnings. Along came Wolfgang Becker and Detlev Buck — the latter, a farmer’s son from Schleswig-Holstein, who according to legend, “bribed” the entrance committee at the entrance examination with a sack of potatoes.
Autor cinema began to grow up around the year 2000 under the label Berlin School. Their protagonists Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan and Angela Schanelec have remained the figureheads of this era to this day.
After the resignation of DFFB director of 12 years, Reinhard Hauff in 2005 students protested against the appointment procedure which continued through a succession of directors until 2015, when Ben Gibson was elected new director of the DFFB by an Appointment Commission following an Academy presentation of the candidates in 2015.
Ben Gibson previously worked at the Australian National Film School (2014–2016), and was Director of the London Film School (2001–14). He is also a visiting professor at Goldsmiths London University. From 1986 to 2001 he worked as an independent producer and as Head of Production at the British Film Institute (BFI). His production credits include: Terence Davie’s THE LONG DAY CLOSES, Derek Jarman’s WITTGENSTEIN, John Maybury’s LOVE IS THE DEVIL, Carine Adler’s UNDER THE SKIN and Jasmin Dizdar’s BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE, more than 20 other low budget features and numerous short films by directors including Patrick Keiller, Gurinder Chadha, Lynne Ramsay, Richard Kwietniowski and Andrew Kotting. From 1981 to 1987 he was a partner in distributors The Other Cinema/Metro Pictures, acquiring and promoting films by Almodovar, Marker, Akerman and Godard, as well as opening London’s Metro Cinema. He has also been a theater director, a film programmer and a film critic and journalist.
DFFB Archiv der Deutschen Kinemathek
Website der Freunde & Förderer der DFFB
Deutsche Film- und Fernseh-
akademie Berlin GmbH
Potsdamer Straße 2 | 10785 Berlin
