A Portrait of Producer Sandra Maischberger

It’s almost 25 years since Sandra Maischberger, one of Germany’s leading TV journalists, and her cinematographer husband Jan Kerhart took the decision to set up their own production company Vincent Productions with offices in Berlin and Hamburg.

“We made this move because we wanted to be able to choose the people to work with as well as the subjects to cover and our way of working,” Maischberger recalls.

Given both of their journalistic backgrounds, it was not surprising that Vincent Productions has had a focus on the documentary genre, ranging from reportage series for Arte through portraits of such eminent political figures as Helmut Schmidt and Richard von Weizsäcker to documentary series about the six countries bordering the Black Sea and life on the Arabian Peninsula.

“I would say that there are two common threads running through our productions,” Maisch­berger says. “On the one hand, we are dealing with socially relevant and political topics – we were one of the first production companies to shoot in Saudi Arabia –, but other projects have a lot to do with nature and the beauty of this world.”

At the same time, it wasn’t long after the com­pany’s founding before they decided to make their first foray into the docudrama genre with ES IST 20 UHR… DIE TAGESSCHAU WIRD 50 to celebrate the 50th anniversary in 2002 of the main evening news programme. “We took this step because there are some subjects where there aren’t any images, so you have to create them yourself with actors and reenactments.”

Since then, the company has returned to the docudrama format, among others, for A BLIND HERO – THE LOVE OF OTTO WEIDT (2013) telling the story of the Berlin brush manufacturer Otto Weidt who saved countless Jews during the Nazi reign of terror, as well as THE GOOD GÖRING (2015) about the relationship between two very dissimilar brothers, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and the largely forgotten younger Albert who was instrumental in saving many lives during the Third Reich.

Sherry Hormann’s 2019 film A REGULAR WOMAN about the young Turkish woman Hatun Aynar Sürücü who was shot dead by her brother in an honour killing on a Berlin street in 2005 was initially conceived as a docudrama, but subsequently became a completely narrative feature.

“Narrative features are definitely a field we’d like to explore further,” Maischberger explains “We have feature projects in development and are looking for strategic partnerships on the national and international market to expand in this field.“

Meanwhile, Vincent Productions’ latest project RIEFENSTAHL – which will be screened in the Out of Competition section at the Venice Film Festival 2024 – sees Maischberger concluding a journey that she began with an interview she had with the world-famous but controversial filmmaker 2002. When Maischberger learnt in 2017 that Leni Riefenstahl’s estate of 700 boxes had been brought to the archive of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, she managed to obtain exclusive access to the boxes’ contents as the basis for a documentary project.

“When it came to finding a director to take on this project, it didn’t take long for us to decide on Andres Veiel, not least because of his work on BEUYS,” Maischberger recalls. “Andres has an incredible grasp of psychology, which is important when you are trying to decipher such a complex personality,” she explains. „His approach is artistic, but with journalistic aspects. The film is therefore just as much a work of art as a report.“

RIEFENSTAHL, which will be released in cinemas in German-speaking countries this autumn, intends to contribute to the public debate on current political issues. “Our film will be appearing as elections are held in east Germany and the USA and asking, among other things, how mecha­nisms of manipulation operate and how one can think today in fascist terms,” Maischberger says. “The film we’re presenting is the right one for the times we are currently living in.”

Martin Blaney