On May 9th the German Film Awards will be awarded once more. Time to let all nominated producers from the feature film, documentary and children’s film categories have their say in a representative survey. In case you’re wondering, the order is alphabetical by film title, regardless of category. Here Ibrahim Nash’at, who has a chance of winning the Lola for Best Documentary with his team from “Hollywoodgate” (Talal Derki, Shane Boris, Odessa Rae).
Congratulations on the nomination! What does it mean to you? How important is the German Film Award to you? Has the fact that the prize is no longer endowed changed anything for you?
Ibrahim Nash’at: Thank you so much. The nomination means a lot to the four of us and it is an honor to our team regardless of the fact that the award is endowed or not. And this recognition is very personally meaningful to our film team members who have been residents for many years in Germany: Producer Talal Derki and Director/Co-Producer Ibrahim Nash’at. Being nominated By the German Film Academy is not just a professional honor, it feels more like a form of acceptance and acknowledgment from the community, especially in today’s difficult political climate in the country. This nomination sends a meaningful signal that there are still diverse voices in Germany, and that the works from filmmakers with migrant backgrounds are not only seen but valued contributions to society.
When you look back on the work on your film: What are you most proud of? What makes this project special, both in general and for you?
Ibrahim Nash’at: What we are most proud of is how deeply international our film is, both in how it was made and what it represents. We were over 15 nationalities working on the film, and we all came together with our differences to share our pain of wars, the traumas that it leaves behind, and the need to make sense of what we collectively carry with us. We began our journey to make a film that was relevant to people in our lives, and by making that together, it became an international film that exposes the situation in Afghanistan through the experience of the filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at that lived with the Taliban for a year.
The amendment to the Film Funding Act just went through at the end of 2024. What do you hope for from the new government? What needs to happen? What steps are now important to make Germany an attractive film location overall?
Ibrahim Nash’at: We hope that the future of German cinema will support the making of more stories that are daring, diverse, relevant and are outside the typical topics that we see in the daily news. And we hope that the funding system will protect artistic freedom and allow room for risk and not just formulaic storytelling. For more productions to take place in Germany, especially international co-productions such as ours, the bureaucratic process needs to be more flexible and less complicated, which would allow us to invest more of our time in the creative process and less in doing the paperwork needed.
We are still in times of change. Do you think German cinema will be vital and relevant in 2025?
Ibrahim Nash’at: From Fassbinder to Haneke, Farocki to Herzog, Akin to Ade, German filmmakers have not been afraid to look at what is wrong in our world and off in ourselves. I think it is clear to all of us now that 2025 will be a year that marks the changing of the world order and a global period of massive transformation, unrest, and uncertainty. German cinema will have to do what it always does: help show us the reality of our situation and in so doing illuminate the possibility of a way through.