In its ninth year, the February 19 Face to Face With German Films showcase seeks to increase the visibility of German filmmakers by presenting them to leading international players attending Berlinale. One of the German talents this year is Hamburg-based multi award-winning documentary filmmaker Moritz Müller-Preißer who will be presenting his feature debut God’s Other Plan in early 2024. He talks to Business Doc Europe.
Before recognising film as a vocation, Hamburg-based Moritz Müller-Preißer studied Media Engineering and Social Sciences. He soon figured out that he wasn’t cut out for engineering and that social science “goes everywhere” but tends to deliver “nothing,” being a hotchpotch of disciplines. But he always made films as a teenager and retained a deep interest in cameras and photography. So in his early 20’s he enrolled at the University of Television and Film Munich. “I think I just needed this little time in my twenties to figure out that I really wanted to pursue my passion, which was film,” he tells BDE.
Not that he totally turned his back on the social sciences. Far from it, when one assesses a growing body of work that embraces sociological, anthropological and psychological themes. His bio stresses how his “focus lies on human-centred, subcultural stories, apart from the norm, [which] explore what is really true in the reality.” This is evident in his multi award-winning short film Haeberli (2020), about an inveterate letter writer man who has not tidied up since his mother’s death. It is described as “a portrait about one man’s right to self-will in his own town, his own house – and his very own head.”
“I have this mad, almost Ulrich Seidel-like, interest in those people that are living so apart from the norm, but who are living a quite happy life, but a life which is so different to mine,” Müller-Preißer explains. “Just to recognize that they’re living, that they don’t really care about others or what other people think of them. I get pulled in by these characters. These are my fascination. And the more absurd the better.”
Müller-Preißer underlines that his approach to his docmaking is particularly cinematic. “For example, inHaeberli, I viewed very carefully how my DP was arranging the picture…I don’t shy away from waiting until we really have the picture that I want.”
Fellow students used to tell him that he has a great eye for discovering the inherent sense of irony within his subjects or any given situation. Also, he has, together with his editor Hauke von Stietencron, a penchant for fast editing and for jarring jump cuts, he admits.
Neither is he afraid to explore the line between doc and fiction in how he arranges his protagonists. “I was really inspired by this one documentary, The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reed by Feargal Ward. It’s an Irish Irish/German production and he combines the documentary and the fiction layers so well. In the first half of the film that you don’t even notice that it’s not fiction.”
“I go so far that I’m really interested to combine fiction and documentary layers that you don’t really know whether it’s true or not. So this is my deep interest, to maybe fuck up the audience in the first half, and [let them] see [from there] what the documentary is all about.”
Müller-Preißer is fascinated by short form filmmaking, but it has its limitations, he stresses. “You can totally turn any topic into a short film because it doesn’t really need any dramaturgy,” he says. It can be produced “in a day” and the opportunities for risk taking are immense.“
But after a certain duration, a dramaturgical structure is much needed, he underlines. “After 60 minutes you really need some point and some reason why the viewer has to keep on viewing your documentary. So this is a motivation to make feature films.”
Right now, he is in late post-production on his feature debut God’s Other Plan, the idea for which derived from his high school student days when he lived for a year in Utah with a Mormon family.
“I’m so fascinated by this religion because for me it has one of the most beautiful beliefs in the afterlife, what happens after death. But I really didn’t know how to make a film about it until my host brother Riley – he was actually married to a woman and had a daughter – then came out as gay,” Müller-Preißer explains. “He left the Mormon church and married his husband, and they’re now living together in a blended family with his ex-wife and daughter. And they also adopted another son. So they’re living totally apart from their former life. Of course they have a lot of conflicts of acceptance within their Mormon families. And I told myself, I have to document this.”
The German director is also developing a documentary series about post-WW2 transgenerational trauma, titled Thanks Opa (Thanks Grandpa). “I’m totally in research mode right now, but I really want to find out with three protagonists from three different generations what makes them who they are today, what derives from their transgenerational war traumas, and just maybe find the German soul. What does it really mean to be German if you have a family that has a World War II history? It has a lot to do with personality psychology, which I’m very interested in.”
During the Face to Face With German Films showcase, Müller-Preißer will be looking to exploit the networking opportunities on offer. “Berlin is always about meeting other very interesting filmmakers from all around the world. And also maybe to meet future collaborators. Maybe we can build a series together or work in co-direction. So that’s my number one interest. And then, of course, just finding the people with money for films who have a passion for filmmaking.”
