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Introduction
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Thomas Struck (right) at the Berlinale Talent Campus.
Photo courtesy Berlinale |
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Thomas Struck is a celebrity in German cinema. His name connotes different things to different people. For some within the German film industry, he is a talented experimental filmmaker and an able administrator who has been instrumental in the founding of the European Film Distribution Organisation. For those who know him at the Berlinale, especially at the Berlinale Talent Campus, he is a talent spotter whose vigilant eyes have revealed many a gifted young filmmaker from around the world. Under his able leadership, the Berlinale Talent Campus has helped a lot of young cineastes to interact freely with established cineastes. The Berlinale Talent Campus is a forum where young filmmakers attend various workshops, interactive sessions and engage in discussions with established filmmakers. The Berlinale Talent Campus has given wings to gifted filmmakers from all over the world. What is the proof of its success? Cannes 2005 Camera d’or winner Vimukti Jayasundara was spotted at the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2003. One could ask why Thomas Struck’s Berlinale Talent Campus efforts are so unique. They are unique because they offer solid proof that big festivals can also play an active part in revealing up-and-coming filmmakers.
German-Hollywood Connection
Interview with Thomas Struck
Talent Manager for the Berlinale Talent Campus
By Lalit Rao | July 2005 | 7th Osian Cinefan Asian Film Festival
Also see the related links at the end of the interview.
German-Hollywood Connection: You started the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2003 and it has been three years that the Talent Campus is there in the Berlin International Film Festival. So what are its achievements from the beginning?
Thomas Struck: The idea is to give young emerging filmmakers a platform for communication because, you see, you cannot order good films to be made. You can only provide a background, a platform where people start to get ideas and start to find people to work with. This is basically done at the talent campus. So after three years we know that it works, because at the last Berlinale Film Festival there were already more than 20 filmmakers who were former talents at the Talent Campus, who were represented with films at the festival. There were Talent Campus people represented at the Cannes festival winning prizes. There were people from all over the world for whom the Berlinale Talent Campus was a connection point from which they got a lot of inspiration and a lot of connections.
G-HC: You must surely be getting a lot of applications from many countries. Could you please tell us more about the selection process? How many applications do you receive? How are these applications scrutinized? How is final selection done?
Struck: How do you select a talent. That is the question! That was the basic question we asked ourselves when we started Berlinale Talent Campus. You know people can write long CVs, write a lot of filmographies, can write about how many prizes they have won, but we cannot check that.
G-HC: There are websites which can check it!
Struck: There would be a way to check, but that would involve a lot of work. The basic idea is to have a work sample. People apply with a work sample of a little piece of video of approximately one minute. They can do what they want. They can shoot something that they have in mind. They can even do a sample of formal work. It could be anything.
G-HC: It could be anything? Even animation?
Struck: It could be anything. Of course. Any genre. Anything. One can shoot and say, “Hello, I am XYZ,” provided it is done in an amazing way. People say a minute in cinema is impossible, but it is possible to shoot in a minute. A minute in a film can be an eternity. The basic filmmaking is the economy of how people use their time. A minute is definitely enough to show what kind of a person a filmmaker is, what kind of style this filmmaker has, what is in the mind of the filmmaker, what the ideas are. We get about 2,000 to 3,000 of these work samples. Of course, writers can send five pages of a script. Score people, music people can send work samples of five minutes. When we go through these applications, we just have a basic gut reaction. It is like when we go to a cinema. I am not an analyst. I get a basic feeling. This feeling is shared with our team, which comes from different corners of the world.
G-HC: Does this selection team change year by year?
Struck: Yeah, this team changes year by year, but we have a system where we have people partly from last year and partly new people coming in.
G-HC: Are these selectors from Germany?
Struck: This team is international in nature. We have people from Germany, the U.S.A., South America, Asia. We try to get an international team because it helps us to get an idea about participants’ works. Sometimes I don’t understand a film from India, for example. Sometimes I don’t understand things coming from Latin America. So these selectors help us to tell what a particular participant wishes to say through his work.
Continued...
NEXT > Interview - Part 2
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