Building an Icon two years in
As Germany’s Bavaria Fiction spins its documentary unit off into a separate brand called Icon Docs, the company’s head of documentaries, Emanuel Rotstein, talks of the challenges of a contracting doc market and a new project examining the relationship between Hollywood and the Nazis.
Emanuel Rotstein
You set this documentary unit up in 2022 and have recently rebranded as Icon Docs, how have the first two years been?
Absolutely great. We’ve been networking our backsides off for two years and we’ve managed to land two major projects. One for Sky, a 90-minute true crime feature doc called The Car Park Murder, and Ultra Orthodox for ZDF and Arte, about a gentleman who has left the Orthodox Jewish community. There are many more projects in the pipeline and the first two years have been great so far.
How is the market in general?
I would say when we started two years ago the broadcasters were still commissioning and were interested in stories. They’re still interested in big stories but what we’ve witnessed is a historic consolidation of the market. A lot of smaller companies and independent producers are looking for support from the from the bigwigs in the industry. That’s an opportunity for us to come in and put smaller companies and independents under our wings and work with them together. I think that’s that’s a win-win situation because we get a lot of creative ideas, input and amazing talent from the market, while people who have been struggling the last couple of months financially get security when they collaborate with us.
Is the situation in Germany the same as elsewhere?
There’s a division between the public broadcasters, the private channels and the streamers in Germany. The streamers and the private channels are commissioning less than in the past. I think the so-called heydays or golden age of documentary might have reached its peak in Germany as well. What we are witnessing is an increased interest from the public broadcasters for documentary series and for larger documentaries. The appetite has constantly, increased over the last couple of years. They’re looking for larger projects. Fewer but larger.
The German market is a little bit different because we don’t have those mega hosts or mega executive producers and that that rings a bell outside of Germany. We are basically looking at our market whereas the UK can cater to the whole world. The mega documentaries are not that big like they are in the English-speaking territories. We still have three-part documentary series, mainly for the streaming services or the public broadcasters, this is what they’re interested in. But they’re also looking for, for five- to eight-part programmes for linear. So this is something we are also considering.
What about the streamers and factual in your part of the world? Did they get most of their stuff from the US or are they looking locally as well?
From my experience they have reduced the local commissions because I think there is a point of saturation already in the market. They have realised that local productions have not necessarily increased their appeal to a local audience. They are looking for larger IPs, and for entertainment content.
Benedikt Toth was convicted of The Car Park Murder
Is true crime the main focus for you, or are you branching into other genres?
I think we will continue looking into true crime. Many of the stories have been told before in Germany, especially by the public broadcasters, so you need to find a different angle, you need to find a different way of storytelling or you have to have unique access like we did with The Car Park Murder. We had the great opportunity to witness the release of the convicted murderer during of the filming of the production so this is this was a great asset, but I think this it’s one in 100 you manage to find a story like this and get all the trust and support, from the legal team, from the man himself and also from the from the channel.
Besides true crime I think history is in again. We live in a very politically and socially volatile situation. People are looking back in history to get an idea of the present through the prism of the past. This is something I would love to pursue. I have been working in history docs for a very long time. First as a freelancer then as a programme executive at the History Channel. So, history and true crime. And any story that features the big human challenges. That gives us an idea who we are as humans and in which situation we are currently socially and politically.
Do you collaborate much with the fiction side of the company?
Absolutely, constant communication. The Car Park Murder was initially conceived as a feature film but as we went along the factual part was stronger than the fiction part so we decided as a company to pursue it as a documentary. There are other cases, for example, where I look into a story and I think this sounds great as a documentary. I love the story, but we are struggling to find archival footage or the witnesses have been dead for a long time. This is something I would hand over to my fiction colleagues. We love the idea of back-to-back documentaries where you have a feature film and you add a documentary to give the viewers more journalistic depth to it.
What’s your three-year plan?
I would like to develop the remit of our company. I would like to venture out into different forms of non-fiction storytelling like science and history. We might add factual entertainment to our slate. This is something I’m very interested and very curious in. We want to grow and scale what we do. I think the high-end feature documentary market is good and still very important but nonetheless, I would like to add other non-fiction formats like the stuff I did previously at A+E.
Something else we’re considering is international coproductions. It’s of the utmost interest for us for a variety of reasons. First, we are getting amazing stories from other countries that have either a small German angle to it, a German protagonist, or are so universal in their storytelling that they resonate with the German audience. These are the stories we are looking for. We’ve had talks with people from Cuba, the UK, India. There are parts of the world where you’d never have thought you’d get a story that would resonate with a German audience but when our country was split into East and West Germany the East of the country had political and military relations with many countries across the world that offer fascinating stories which played out behind The Iron Curtain.
Ultra Orthodox was made for ZDF and Arte
What’s the biggest challenge you face?
Probably the international political environment is one situation. There are many crises and wars across the world.
The market in general is decreasing. We definitely feel that with private channels. If the advertising market decreases they are less interested in spending money. The public broadcasters are challenged politically from the extreme left to extreme right regarding their fees, so money is reducing and we have to think about how we get other means of financing and coproduction rather than the classical commission you got in the past. It could be through coproduction, it could be getting brands involved, but we need more partners and more international partners. Coproduction and collaboration will be key in future.
What are you working on next?
There are three projects I’m particularly keen on.
One is Hitler in Hollywood (wt), about the relationship between the Nazis and Hollywood. This is very interesting because we have found an unknown story of a German talent agent who was originally from the Czech Republic who became the saviour of the German emigre community – people in Germany, Austria, and France, towards the end of the 1930s, who had to flee Germany. Using the European film fund he would held get them to America and to safety. They contacted Paul Corner and he helped him with the European Film Fund to, get to America and to get to safety. He garnered support from the whole Hollywood business industry to get those people work permits and affidavits.
It’s an untold story which also looks at the very critical relationship between the Hollywood studios and the Nazis, between their commercial endeavors and the search for morality. It’s in development, we’ve just finished the treatment, we’re looking at a 90-minute feature doc for cinema and television. We are looking for broadcast and coproduction partners on that.
I’ve also been working for the last couple of months on a documentary about the Nova Music Festival , Black Saturday: The Survivors of October 7 (wt). This is quite unique because we were approached by parents of a survivor. He survived the day together with his friends in a bomb shelter which was attacked by terrorists using Molotov cocktails, grenades and AR 15 fire.
This group of kids survived by hiding under dead bodies. It’s very, very raw. They brought it to us because they’ve realised they have to capture this moment in time. The parents financed a camera crew in Israel, and they reached out to the group of friends, and everybody sat in front of the camera and told the story.
What is so fascinating about it is we live in a social media and mobile age and they all recorded and filmed the events, and sent text and audio messages to their parents which we have access to. Obviously the big question is how much you include and exclude. It’s early stages but we have interest from A+E in Germany and several other territories. I would like to release it on January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day, because we won’t make it in time for the one-year anniversary.
We’ve also got a Behind the Rainbow – The Rock Concert at Wackersdorf (wt), about the biggest rock concert in German history, the German Woodstock, in 1986. It was in protest against a nuclear reprocessing plant which was a big thing in the 1980s. People were going crazy, fighting the police and the Bavarian government, they were getting nowhere, but then the biggest names in the German rock industry came together all on one weekend to make it a huge international event and issue. We’re re-telling the story of the concert and the movement.
