In this era, the world in general, and the film industry definitely, seek security. With a high-risk investment like a movie, where still no-one knows how to predict success for out-of-the-ordinary films, that is almost understandable. Yet "interesting" often means "unknown", and you simply cannot attain security about something unknown.
Most of the industry stills tries to secure their investment: attached stars, previous work, long experience, proven talent, company track records … Meaning in practice that you can maybe introduce one unkown, new element (= person) into a film package, but the rest please be proven successful!
We feel that hinders progress, keeps talent from being discovered, and too strongly reinforces existing schemes to be duplicated.
We have bumped into this glass ceiling ourselves. We have been told that our track record was insufficient and that we should rather attach ourselves to established partners. We have missed mentors who were actually engaged in us. We have worked with people who had ulterior motives but did not disclose them, to our disadvantage. And so on.
We want to spare others that experience. We want to see talent flourish into a professional livelihood. We want to see more interesting movies, by new
It is likely that artists are more intrinsically motivated than other professionals.
Yet for artists in the 21st century, word on the street is:
Put half your time and money into your artwork.
Put the other half of your time and money into its promotion!
So every creative, basically, needs to be a salesperson. Yet we know only very few artists or filmmakers who love to do social media posts, or who love to write press releases and maintain long-term relationships to journalists or festival programmers, or who systematically research possible matching distributors and approach them professionally.
That is what the Berlin Movie Booster Club is for. We want to help filmmakers focus on their craft, and provide them with at least minimum money for expenses, and support them in marketing and finding distribution. So we act, in fact, as a not-for-profit, grassroots film studio.
To see how that works in detail, read on in our About Us and our Projects.