Since my last blog on this Berlin-based production company, ‘The Girl From Köln’ has progressed from pre-production to post-production. The press is onto it as it will be 50 years in January that Keith Jarrett first played The Köln Concert, released in 1975 to become the best-selling piano recording in history. Requests for news are coming in daily. And so much has happened since then, including One Two’s creating a slate of seven unique film projects.
We will get to The Girl From Köln later, but now let’s talk with Sol Bondy’s partner Fred Burle at One Two Films.
In Cannes this year One Two celebrated Armand, the Camera d’Or winner of Un Certain Regard and the feature debut of Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, the grandson of Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergmann. When I congratulated Sol on the film at the Brandenberg Reception in Cannes, he told me to talk with Fred because Armand was a result of a step he decided to take for choosing films to make.
SydneysBuzz: Before we begin to talk about your strategy, tell me about yourself.
Fred: Oh, my strategy about people to work with…well I was always a big cinephile. I was raised in the small town of Pirapora in Brazil in a big state — Minas Gerais, which alone is bigger than Germany — that borders on Rio and Sao Paulo. It had no cinema. We knew no one in cinema, no one knew how to get into cinema but I always knew I wanted to go to university and study cinema though no one knew how. I went to university in Brasilia in Archival Sciences and I tried to get that to lead to conservation of film. It was my only option. I was working full time and went to school nights. The audio visual department had only daytime courses. I extended my schooling by two years so I could do more in the audio visual department. I was working full time at a notary and negotiated with them to use my holiday time so I could get few hours a week to come in later from my AV course. The AV teachers were also filmmakers and we became friends and then I worked with them to produce their films and they paid — not much as it was for docs for the Brazilian market, so it really was not much. I always wanted to do international coproductions and so before putting down roots in Brazil, I left. I quit, sold everything I had and went to Germany which I felt was one of the best countries to study film, even though German films were not my favorite films as art. But you could study for free there. The first six months I studied German. When I was done, there was only one school where the deadline for applications had not passed. I had eight days to apply to the dffb here in Berlin. I had been a well-read critic in Brazil, my blog got 1,500 readers a day and newpapers also published my critiques. In fact , the first Berlinale I attended was as a journalist. One thing led to the next. I knew it was hard to build a network. I became used to working in the background but was waiting for the moment when I had a good business card. I started at One Two as an assistant and then Sol and his then-partner wanted me permanently so I changed my visa from a student visa, but I needed my diploma to get a work visa and I was not finished with school, but they anticipated my diploma, since I had basically finished classes earlier…Lots of people helped a lot! And with Holy Spider, I then had a really good business card.
S: Sol told me in Cannes to talk to you because the backstory of how you brought in Armand was very interesting in how you choose the people you want to work with. He has often spoken of you so highly that I wanted to speak with you and find out who you are.
Fred: It’s funny, because many people tell me that, but he rarely says it to me directly. The compliments are reciprocal.
S: Speaking of Armand, which I loved and am so glad it won the Camera d’or in Un Certain Regard, it is endemic and worldwide apparently that school personnel has no idea how to deal with school problems today…I have spoken to teachers here in Germany and in U.S. who confirm this. I am interested in education because I was a teacher myself. You see how clueless personnel is in Kore Eda’s Monster, in The Teachers’ Lounge, Armand…
F: and Radical too…
S: Sol said that when Holy Spider was having its great success in Cannes last year, you said to him that while One Two was riding on its success you were going to go talk to those producers and directors you wanted particularly to work with.
F: Yes, I told Sol that while he was handling the talent and the press conferences and talking about the Holy Spider, I wanted to go to filmmakers I really admire and would like to be future collaborators and so I did, but actually it did not work that way with Armand’s producer Andrea Berentsen Ottmar. We didn’t meet in Cannes. Because she was so busy with Un Certain Regard’s screening of Sick of Myself and Kristoffer Borgli who went on to write and direct A24’s Dream Scenario. It was only after we became good friends that I was brought into Armand. We stayed in touch and would zoom every two months with very long talks about what they were doing. Armand already had coproducers in Netherlands and Sweden and there was no room for another coproducer. Nothing was open, although they still had a gap. But Andrea gave me the script and I would comment and I gave Andrea the TheGirl from Cologne to read. I loved the script and wanted to be a part of it. We couldn’t get German TV on this first film but I found a German distributor for all rights — that is very rare — and it was a top distributor. Pandora is the best company, so we both got on board and that closing the financing, plus they could spend freely with no requirements and it gave me a co-producer credit. We did exchange further on script and editing phases.
S: So your strategy was not the underlying cause of getting Armand, but it was the impetus. What about your other upcoming projects?
F: I am traveling a lot looking for new projects as Sol is spending more time with his new family and his wife, who is also a filmmaker, is working on more projects. While he has a more established network and friends who’d send him projects, I’m building that for myself as well. The results of my travels to labs, conferences, etc. are just beginning to come to fruition. Next year we will have up to seven new projects — many of them also coming from the friendships I’ve made. It splits the weight of carrying the company in a better way for us both now.
Persian Lessons was a minority coproduction for us. For Holy Spider, we were originally the second co-production country, but COVID changed everything and became the the main producers. What I want to say is my vision does not always tell a German story. I’d say we are majority producer for a quarter of our projects. The rest are minority but we try to finance a bigger share, something like 20–30% of the financing. We are involved in the early stages, from script development, packaging…
S: What is your ideal project?
F: What moves me is very unpredictable. I like light topics but that is not my soft spot. I want a message for the world — mostly political but not in a cliche way or in your face. Holy Spider is a good example. It’s relevant and yet is a genre thriller, we took a lot of poetic license with the story it was based upon.
I don’t like repeating stories. I like continuity with our talent but no similaries in the stories.
We are now attached to projects in preproduction from Malta, Yemen, Palestine, Morocco and Brazil.
I don’t go to street protests. I like my art to contribute to the world, to touch people in another way…this is my balance for social action…for me, the best way to make dialogue possible again is through art.
S: So tell me about your upcoming projects.
F: Girl from Cologne, now called Koln 75 is almost finished. We shot in October and November 2023 in Germany and Poland and now it’s in post. It was a challenging shoot but we are very happy with the results. The 50 year anniversary of Keith Jarrett’s Cologne Concert is in January and we are getting press requests daily.
S: What is the music for it?
F: The soundtrack is eclectic because Vera Brandes, who, in 1975 at the age of 18, staged the famous Köln Concert by jazz musician Keith Jarrett, heard many types of music, jazz was only one kind.
F: Also we finished shooting April in New York on Ira Sach’s new, very special, very dear to me project. It is shot in one location. Ira optioned rights to shoot a very short book by a journalist called Linda Rosenkranz about the NY photographer Peter Hujar who has lots of friends in the art scene of the time and used to photograph people like Mapplethorpe, Sonntag, Ginsberg… She approached him and spent an entire day with him, with celebrities, etc. Ira wrote the script. Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall will star. It’s now in post. It’s very different from Ira’s other works, it’s a portrait film.
We’re also on board of a Moroccan project directed by Maryam Touzani who had two previous films in Cannes, Adam and The Blue Caftan which was shortlisted for the Academy Awards. This is her first Spanish speaking film. She grew up in northern Morocco where they also speak Spanish. Calle Malaga is a great story and it’s set to shoot in November 2024.
We’re minority producer on a film from Yemen to go in October or November. The director is Sara Ishaq who has made docs so far; her doc short Karama Has No Walls was nominated for an Oscar in 2013. Al Mahatta(or The Station) will be her first fiction feature and is a unique story to shoot in Jordan with the same local team that did Holy Spider with us.
We are also making a rom-com at the end of summer, Any Other Night to be directed by Michiel ten Horn and to shoot in Berlin. It is a Dutch-Canadian-German coproduction in English.
And our first Brazilian co-production which I can’t wait to be able to talk about… I can only tell you off the record on that for now.
S: Thank you for all this! I hope my readers will track down these films and help them find success!
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