Hamburg extends successful series funding

Since the end of 2019, the City of Hamburg has been providing MOIN Film Fund Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein with special funds totalling one million euros per year to attract high-end series to the Hanseatic city.

Since then, MOIN Film Fund has awarded 35 high-end series grants totalling around 3.7 million euros. Eight series have been supported in production, 17 scripts have been funded, as well as ten series in project development. These series funds are to be continued in the future, as Culture Senator Dr Carsten Brosda emphasises: "The series funding is a complete success for Hamburg as a film location. It has enabled top-class series to be produced in the city and in the north. We are thus not only supporting the film scene in the north, but are also successfully present as a film location at renowned festivals. With this funding, we can offer the independent production sector in particular important support and incentives to develop and produce material here locally and bring it to audiences in a variety of ways. We want to continue this success and are therefore campaigning in the current budget negotiations to continue to provide the series funding of one million euros per year in the future."

Filming is currently underway in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein for the six-part series Die Quellen des Bösen (The Sources of Evil), which will be broadcast on RTL+ in 2023. In the thriller series from Director Stephan Rick, produced by the Hamburg-based company Wüste Medien, an East German investigator (Henriette Confurius) and her new partner from Hamburg (Drivers Yardim) hunt a serial killer whose trail leads them into the abysses of the German-German past. The scripts for the thriller series were written by Head Script Writer Catharina Junk and Elke Schuch. The team is currently filming for around two weeks in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. The MOIN Film Fund has supported the Wüste Medien production with 500,000 euros.

Björn VosgerauExecutive Producer at Wüste Medien, explains: "'Die Quellen des Bösen' is a suspenseful thriller series set in the post-reunification period and conceived by Hamburg-based Script Writer Catharina Junk. Thanks to the local series funding, the project got off the ground quickly - this way, the location and we as an independent production company from Hamburg remain competitive in the series segment."

Helge AlbersCEO of MOIN Film Fund, continues: "With the filming of 'Die Quellen des Bösen' and two series premieres at Filmfest Hamburg, our series funding is beginning to bear fruit. The series 'Die Quellen des Bösen' alone is achieving an extremely high regional effect. In concrete terms, this means that the production invests more than six times the amount of our funding back into the region during filming and is therefore a driving force for jobs and service providers here."

The first two funded series that show Hamburg in front of the camera are now celebrating their premiere at Filmfest Hamburg:

The True Crime documentary seriesreeperbahn - special unit 65produced by Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion for ARD, tells the story of Germany's first police unit to combat organised crime - Hamburg's Special Directorate 65 - and its fight against rival criminal gangs, Hells Angels and the US mafia. The MOIN Film Fund has supported the series with 250,000 euros.

In the six-part Amazon Prime series "German Crime Story: Gefesselt", Directors Florian Schwarz focusses on the deeds of acid barrel murderer Raik Doormann (played by Oliver Masucci), who was up to mischief in and around Hamburg in the early 80s and 90s. The series was produced by Neue Bioskop Television for Amazon Prime and supported by the MOIN Film Fund with 350,000 euros.

The seven-part drama series is also subsidised and can already be seen in the ZDF media library.Tod von Freunden by Friedemann Fromm with Jan Josef Liefers in one of the leading roles. The series was produced by Letterbox Filmproduktion.

More about "Die Quellen des Bösen" 1993, East Germany. A girl's body is found on a bed of flowering twigs with Germanic runes carved into her skin in a remote wooded area near the small town of Wussnitz. The resolute young detective Ulrike Bandow (Henriette Confurius) and her new experienced colleague from Hamburg, Koray Larssen (Fahri Yardim), take on their first case together. Mysterious clues lead the unlikely pair of investigators into the German-German past, where they come across a previously undiscovered, bizarre series of murders. Now the perpetrator has returned to the place where it all began. To stop him, the investigators must learn to trust each other. But that's not easy, because Ulrike's own guilt leads to a deep abyss that she never wanted to look into and Koray is also hiding a secret...

Image material Photos of the visit to the film set can be used free of charge with the credit "RTL/Wüste Medien/Anke Neugebauer". Click here to download:https://we.tl/t-qoFSLSFITG

In the photos from left to right:

Photo 1: Helge Albers/MOIN Film Fund, Henriette Confurius, Nico Grein/RTL, Senator for Culture Dr Carsten Brosda, Fahri Yardim, Director of Photography Stephan Rick, Script Writer Catharina Junk, Björn Vosgerau/Wüste Medien, Hauke Bartel/RTL, Evelin Haible/RTL, Director of Photography/DoP Henner Besuch, Daniel Hartmann/RTL

Photo 2: Helge Albers/MOIN Film Fund, Henriette Confurius, Senator for Culture Dr Carsten Brosda, Fahri Yardim, Directors Stephan Rick, Script Writer Catharina Junk, Björn Vosgerau/Wüste Medien

Photo 3: Helge Albers/MOIN Film Fund, Henriette Confurius, Senator for Culture Dr Carsten Brosda, Fahri Yardim