Prolific Berlin-based producer/director Jens Meurer has given details of his latest documentary projects, one of which is as quintessentially English as one can imagine, about an end-of-the-pier variety show on the Norfolk coast.
Meurer confirmed to Business Doc Europe that he has completed his next feature documentary, Seaside Special. The film, shot during the run up to Brexit, is about an end-of-the-pier variety show on Cromer Pier in north Norfolk, one of the last of its kind in Britain. Sales are handled by Deckert Distribution.
It was directed by Meurer himself and produced by Judy Tossell. The film may be about quintessentially British subject matter but it was financed by German and Belgian backers. Financiers include WDR, FARB Film and FFA. The Belgian partners are U Media.
Cromer was ardently pro-leave during the 2016 referendum. The seaside town, according to Meurer, shows a “microcosm of Brexit England.”
“What I saw in Cromer is something that us continentals really love about the English and the Brits,” the German filmmaker said of his documentary which he describes as “a tragicomedy.”
His company, Egoli Tossell, which he set up with Judy Tossell in 2001, following the merger of their former production companies Egoli Films and Tossell Pictures, is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Meurer (whose feature credits include several films with the late Christopher Plummer, among them The Last Station, and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark) has another new doc on the boil, 27 Storeys. This is directed by Austrian newcomer Bianca Gleissinger. It is about a group of high rise buildings in Vienna built in the 1970s as part of a Utopian architecture project – and which have worked as well was originally hoped. Ten thousand people are located there, within three blocks of buildings.
“It’s a completely bizarre and wonderful place,” Meurer, who is producing the doc, comments. “The distinguishing feature is that the architect built swimming pools on top of them [the buildings], saying to the tenants that ‘your pool is slightly bigger than your boss’s.’ It’s social housing that works.”
Meurer’s most recent documentary, An Impossible Project, about eccentric visionary Florian ‘Doc’ Kaps, an Austrian biologist who rescued Polaroid film from oblivion, is about to be released in the UK through Phil Hunt’s distribution outfit, Bohemia Media. The film (on Autlook’s slate) will be available initially to UK viewers through YourScreen (an online platform representing independent cinemas).
Bohemia Media is also releasing the film in the US, at the start of June. An Impossible Project was shot on 35mm. The hope is that physical screenings, from prints, will be possible in both territories post-pandemic.
During lockdown, Meurer has been continuing to develop his long gestating Russian dramatic epic Symphony, about the siege of Leningrad and the performance of Shostakovitch’s Seventh Symphony against all odds in the besieged city.
Meurer first came across the story 30 years ago when he was working as a young documentary filmmaker at the Leningrad Film Studios in 1989. It is a very ambitious project that will be made as an international co-production.
“This is one of Russia’s holy stories,” Meurer says. He aims to make the film in English with an A-list cast and a top director. He is also planning a documentary to accompany the feature.
