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Hollywood goes Berlin

After years of struggling to stay alive, the Babelsberg Film Studio seems to be enjoying some success. Founded in 1911 in the beautiful town of Potsdam, south of Berlin, the film studio had been adrift ever since the UFA closed up shop. The UFA was Germany’s pre-war film production company, which produced such gems as the famous “Der Blaue Engel” ("The Blue Angel"), starring Marlene Dietrich.

But the studio's luck is changing. There are some big German productions at Babelsberg right now, such as “Der Baader Meinhof Komplex”, a film about the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang, based on the bestseller by Stefan Aust, editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, and produced by Bernd Eichinger. Many of Germany’s best actors are involved, such as Bruno Ganz (who played Adolf Hitler in “The Downfall”), Martina Gedeck (who was Christa-Maria Sieland in “The Lives of Others”) and Moritz Bleibtreu (from "Run Lola Run").

Hollywood has also started to descend on Berlin in full force. The city has hosted crews for “Valkyrie”, a film about the legendary plot to kill Hitler, directed by Bryan Singer (United Artists). It stars Tom Cruise as Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the German colonel who made the assassination attempt. Earlier this year, Studio Babelsberg produced “Speed Racer”, another big-budget film (a German-UK production), featuring John Goodman and Susan Sarandon. A Hollywood adaptation of "The Reader", Bernhard Schlink’s award-winning novel, is also expected to come to Berlin and Babelsberg this autumn. Nicole Kidman will star as Hanna Schmidt, an illiterate former SS guard in post-war Heidelberg who has an affair with a 15-year-old boy.

According to Carl Woebcken, the studio’s chief executive, 11 movies (four of which are international) will be produced in Babelsberg in 2007. That doesn't include all the TV productions lined up for this year.

What explains this turn-around? Mr Woebcken says there are several reasons for the sudden boom, but the main catalyst was a new system of state subsidies provided by the National Film Board, regional film boards and the German Film Fund. And, he says, Berlin is still “the most lively, most creative and cheapest city in Germany”. According to Berlin’s traffic coordination office, every day there are a dozen locations in the city where some sort of filming is going on.