German production and sales maestro Heino Deckert was handed the 2025 Docs d’Honor Award during the opening ceremony of the 28th Docs Barcelona. The festival is screening two of his films, the Oscar-nominated Rabbit à la Berlin by Polish Bartosz Konopka, and Heimat is a Space in Time, the final film of Thomas Heise, who passed away in 2024.
After the presentation, Deckert sat down with BDE to discuss his career in film, kicking off with an explanation of why he decided to be a producer, as opposed to a director or DOP or editor.
“Yeah, why the hell did I choose that?” he muses.
As it happens, he has two answers. He hated “white paper,” something he was required to fill with ideas that simply weren’t forthcoming. “It was more or less clear that I would never be somebody who will write a script and then start to film it,” Deckert says. “I learned at film school that I would not becoming a director.”
But he was nevertheless a cineaste, and also a student of law, qualities that would benefit the production company that fellow student Dagmar Jacobsen had in mind and wanted Deckert to partner with her on. So in 1991 the pair set up ma.ja.de, together with a third partner, Lutz Mai. (The company name derived from the prominent letters in the trio’s names.) “It was pretty soon that I decided, okay, being a producer is what I want to do,” he says. ma.ja.de has produced over 90 films since its launch.
Four years later, together with five colleagues from the EAVE class of 1995, he set up d-net to sell the films that they were producing. He later founded the documentary sales company Deckert Distribution.
From the very beginning, Deckert was an internationalist who recognised the need for co-pro. “My brand, more or less, was that I was one of the first ones here in Germany who really went international with documentaries. I would be in in Amsterdam sitting in Forum. I think there were already 300 people sitting there, but only three or four were Germans. At that time it was more and more difficult to get enough broadcast money to make a documentary out of Germany. So that was when I decided to co-produce.”
He forged early alliances with filmmakers who later assumed luminary status, such as Sergey Loznitsa, Victor Kossakovsky and the team of Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth. It was with the latter that he first explored the possibilities of fiction filmmaking.
“The borders of documentaries were just too closed for them. I don’t know if you remember A State of Dogs from Peter Brosens, which was absolutely not a typical documentary anymore. So it was clear that both of them, both Peter and Jessica, were heading for something else and they wanted to do something that was more fiction.”
The pair’s Khadak (2006), produced by Deckert, subsequently won them the ‘Lion of the Future’ for the best feature film debut at Venice 2006. Their second fiction feature, Altiplano, also produced by Deckert, premiered at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes 2009.
Deckert furthermore produced Sergei Loznitsa’s fiction My Joy, which was selected for main competition in Cannes in 2010, and the same director’s In the Fog (2012) which also competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
From a documentary perspective, Deckert cites his working relationships with Victor Kossakovsky and Thomas Heise as of core importance. With Kossakovsky he made the highly acclaimed ¡Vivan las antípodas! (2011), Aquarela (2018) and Architecton (2024).
Deckert opines that Thomas Heise, who died in 2024, was the most important documentary filmmaker Germany has ever produced. As part of its tribute to Deckert, DocsBarcelona is screening Heise’s final film, Heimat is a Space in Time. It is the film that Deckert is most proud of.
“When this film is shown even in 50 years time, people will understand the whole of the 20th Century when they watch it,” he tells Business Doc Europe. The other film within the tribute is Polish Bartosz Konopka’s Oscar-nominated Rabbit à la Berlin (2009).
Deckert describes himself as easily bored and always looking to work with people who can surprise him. “I’m trying to look always for people who are a little bit more, maybe complicated, but who are able to have a vision and an idea of something that is special,” he says. “Maybe I like complicated people because I’m the opposite. I’m just a very easy guy – stable, dependable, reliable – who likes like to be surrounded by complex guys. I think that’s probably it. I like to have people who are a little bit more crazy to make films with. If I read a script and I have the feeling I saw that film already, then I’m not interested.”
He also likes to discover new filmmakers instead of seeking out directors whose work he admires. “I was never in my life seeing something good and then going to that director to say, ‘I want to make the next film with you.’ That never happened to me. I don’t know why I’m doing that. Maybe I’m too shy for it. Of course, I see something and I think, ‘wow, it would be fantastic to have made that film,’ but I would never say I have to work with that person.”
When asked the last film he felt really proud to have produced, he names the fiction film The Universal Theory, (2023) Timm Kröger’s feature debut which world-premiered at Venice where it won the Bisato d’Oro Best Film award.
All in all, Deckert admits to feeling dismayed when he assesses the current state of the docosphere, especially within the US with Trump back in power.
“The biggest success of documentaries, at least in the US, was during Trump’s first period. That was the golden period, of course. The streamers were coming up on the one side, but also companies like Participant with whom I worked on three films, and there was A24 who was starting to do documentaries. And also there were audiences. I think it was 2018 when there were a few films that went over $10 million at the cinema (general titles exceeding this worldwide figure include Free Solo and Three Identical Strangers, with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 coming in just shy of $7 million). So there was quite a lot of success and there were a lot of films.”
“But now in the second period [of Trump’s presidency] it’s very hard. Getting American money is more or less impossible at the moment when you’re not doing true crime or celebrities, and so it’s totally the other way around. I was waiting for Trump to come in again a second time and I thought, ‘okay, now they will start to make documentaries again about all these liars who are not telling the truth.’ I thought people would have that feeling again for going to a documentary and seeing something that is actually true. But I don’t see that at the moment, not at all. I only see a kind of lethargy,” Deckert signs off.
