Focus on our guest country: Germany

As in every edition, MIFC spotlights a country. And last year Poland was succeeded by Germany this year. A brief overview of Germany, in particular around their new plan for the digitisation of German heritage films.

They were six alongside Jean-Christophe Simon, director of Films Boutique and moderator of the day: Fabio Quade, Sales and Distribution at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation, Dr. Rainer Rother, Artistic Director of the Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Claire Brunel, Public Relations and Business Affairs at the Wim Wenders Foundation, Torsten Radeck, Marketing Director, Home entertainment Studiocanal GmbH and Levko Kondratjuk, Associate Director, Camera Obscura Filmdistribution.  

This focus on Germany has mainly concentrated on the major event of this year 2019, and for the next 10 years, in the world of heritage cinema: the plan for the digitisation of German classics. This idea was born in 2008 in the German Parliament, as Rainer Rother recounted, when a member of parliament realized that a film from his childhood was no longer available anywhere, that it had disappeared. The whole political class then became aware that film heritage was a precious but fragile thing that needed to be preserved. It still took nearly eleven years for the safeguarding plan to come to life. But since January 2019, a fund has been launched, equally funded by the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), the FFA and the Länder, up to €10 million per year and spread over ten years, for the digitisation of cinema films. This funding is provided in three areas: exploitation, conservation and conservation need. A review will be carried out in four years' time but, as Rainer Rother hopes, this programme should be renewed at the end of these ten years, as the task is so heavy and concerns not only the masterpieces known in Germany but also smaller but as culturally important films from across the Rhine. 

A plan that is already benefiting some people around the table, such as Torsten Radeck, Fabio Quade and Claire Brunel. But not Levko Kondratjuk because, as the latter points out, this digitisation programme only concerns German films and is not open to other filmographies. For his part, he joins forces with other foreign distributors to buy the rights in-group and share the costs of restoration and digitisation, which they do themselves: "Our films are too obscure to be restored by Eclair or Bologna," he says laughingly. 

Following this focus on this new major digitisation project, all the participants took stock on the place of heritage in Germany. And the report is a little bitter. If they all insist on the successful work of certain platforms such as MUBI, which takes heritage films and is able to support it, this remains an exception as the rest of these services are not very interested in this type of films, which they buy at low prices. In the same way in theatres, it is important to promote these heritage screenings, to market them extensively and to choose appropriate moments (such as anniversaries, concomitant exhibitions...) to schedule them. "A real bee's work" as Claire Brunel explains. The latter added furthermore that work on the younger generation, particularly with image education, was essential even if, in Germany, in her opinion, cinema is not considered as an art but as a media and that it is still difficult to convince teachers, and even at government level, to teach it.

Despite some successes such as the recent release of the Final Cut of Apocalypse Now, which, broadcasted in one day in a single event throughout Germany by Studiocanal, managed to attract some 12,000 spectators, the struggle to promote and bring heritage to life in Germany remains difficult. But all of them have affirmed their readiness to lead it.