Becoming human at the abyss

In 2018, the script for "Gewalten" was nominated for the prestigious Thomas Strittmatter Award, which is presented annually at the Berlinale. Executive Producer and CEO of Kinescope Film Matthias Greving also became aware of Hatz. Together with his colleague Janina Sara Hennemann, he watched his first films after reading the script. They were completely convinced by the script and found "that there was already a great consistency in his early work, which is now also expressed in his cinema debut film", says Greving, who attests that the Script Writer and Directors have already found their own way. "He succeeds in capturing worlds in a fascinating way. He has a narrative power and his own signature style, which is also evident in his documentary films."

"Gewalten" tells the story of the boy Daniel (Malte Oskar Frank), who cares for his terminally ill father (Robert Kuchenbuch) and is exploited by his aggressive brother (Eric Cordes). The 14-year-old teenager's everyday life in a village plagued by rural exodus is characterised by violence, emotional coldness and a lack of prospects. In this isolation, he seeks and finds a new realm of experience in nature, in a nearby dense forest that he wanders through.

Family drama or coming of age film? Constantin Hatz doesn't like these categorisations. He sees his film more as a parable about the feeling of world-weariness. "I think that my film accompanies the boy as he becomes a human being in the midst of this loveless world of violence and suffering, which becomes a source of higher knowledge." Hatz sees the excursions into nature as a romantic motif, "as a place of spiritual experience", as he puts it. At the centre of the film is a family torn apart in a crisis situation, an aspect that has also played a role in other films by Constantin Hatz: "Those films were also about unconventional family constellations, about families under particular tension." Executive Producer Matthias Greving produced the 2015 ZDF film "Die Hände meiner Mutter" (My Mother's Hands), which raised awareness of the taboo subject of domestic violence. Internal family tensions and exceptional situations, which often don't get through to the outside world and therefore have an even stronger effect on the inside, are of great interest to the Executive Producer, and he found that Constantin Hatz's material fits in well with this complex of topics.

The film "Gewalten" was supposed to be shot in 2020, but the coronavirus lockdown prevented this for the time being. Filming, which took place in the region around Amt Neuhaus, in the Harz Mountains and also in Hamburg, had to be postponed from March to October and November, where the next pandemic lockdown caught up with and hindered filming almost halfway through. "It was extremely challenging for our team," reports Greving, who, as an Executive Producer, has experience of making films in times of coronavirus. The biopic "Heinrich Vogler", which will be released in cinemas in May this year, was one of the first films that could be shot again after the lockdown in northern Germany in May 2020. "These experiences also helped us with 'Gewalten'."

Founded in 2015, the independent production company Kinescope Film is based in Bremen and has additional companies in Hamburg and Cologne as well as a branch in Frankfurt. Directors and Executive Producer Matthias Greving and his team produce national and international feature films and series as well as documentaries for cinema, TV and online. "We look for stories and talents that we find exciting and analyse how and in which formats these can be implemented most appropriately," he says. The focus is currently still on documentary productions, but Greving wants to increase the proportion of fictional formats in the future so that the annual output is balanced.

Greving is counting on further collaboration with Hatz, whose next film "Störung" is currently in final production and will once again be produced by Kinescope Film. And another film by Constantin Hatz, for which the finished script is already available, is currently being prepared for production. Discovering talent at an early stage and working with them on an ongoing basis is the aim of Bremen-based Kinescope Film. The team was really looking forward to the premiere of "Gewalten" at the Berlinale 2022 - and now cinema audiences can look forward to it. "Gewalten" opens in German cinemas on 11 May.