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EMERGING PRODUCERS 2019

Georg Tiller • Producer, Subobscura Films

“Documentaries should create a critical counterweight to nationalistic pipe dreams”

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- Interview with Georg Tiller, producer for Austrian outfit Subobscura Films and selected for the 2019 Emerging Producers programme

Georg Tiller • Producer, Subobscura Films

Interview with Georg Tiller, producer for Austrian outfit Subobscura Films and selected for the 2019 Emerging Producers programme.

Why do you produce documentaries? Do you understand documentary film as an instrument of social and political change?
Georg Tiller: 
Documentaries are a great way for self-education on certain topics, they allow you to produce for a comparable small budget aesthetically challenging films that can raise serious questions about social and economic topics. Documentaries can function as means to preserve memory, to record a certain way how the world looks and thinks at a certain moment in time. As this they can contribute to a discourse and can act as an amplifier. Real social and political change can only come through an educated public that has lived through the dialectics of enlightenment. Our time is a great time to be challenged by paradoxes of extremes and therefore a time where documentary, in itself in many cases an internationalist project, should create a critical counterweight to nationalistic pipe dreams.

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What qualities should a documentary producer have these days?
Well read, opinionated, socially aware, great communicators, humorous, passionate and patient, someone who knows when to enjoy a good meal and when to starve for a reason. 

What do you think is the future of distribution of documentary films?
At the moment it seems that digital distribution at curated platforms are the way most distribution takes place. I think it is critical that there remain independent platforms that bring challenging content to an interested audience and are a counterweight to players like Netflix who want to monopolize audiovisual content.

What projects do you have under way (including in the area of fiction film and other projects)?
Marío (documentary, director: Billy Woodberry)
The Blue of the Forest (fiction, director: Maéva Ranaivojaona)
City of Falls (fiction, director: Georg Tiller)

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Emerging Producers is a promotional and educational project, which brings together talented European documentary film producers. The programme is organised and curated by the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.

Deadline for applications to the Emerging Producers 2020 edition is 15 March, 2019. Click here.

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