International Disruptors: Fabian Gasmia Of Seven Elephants On Making Lena Dunham & Stephen Fry Starrer ‘Treasure’, His “Special Relationship” With France & Why German Cinema Is Having A “Renaissance”
Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week we’re talking to leading German producer Fabian Gasmia, whose credits include Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, Leos Carax’s Annette and, more recently, Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry starrer Treasure, which had its North American premiere at Tribeca last weekend. Gasmia, who set up production banner Seven Elephants in 2018 with directors Julia von Heinz, Erik Schmitt and David Wnendt, talks us through building that outfit, his “special relationship” with France and why he thinks German cinema is having a “renaissance.”
International relationships are proving more significant than ever in what is now a fragile and economically strained independent film market and Fabian Gasmia is proving to be a European partner with clout. The German producer, who recently produced Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry character drama Treasure, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and is set to launch in U.S. and UK theatres on Friday, has quietly become one of Europe’s leading independent producers and co-production partners.
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No stranger to the festival circuit, Gasmia has a raft of top-notch European indie projects under his belt having co-produced projects such as Cannes Competition entries Personal Shopper from Olivier Assayas and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree as well as Cannes 2021 opener Annette from helmer Leox Carax. These were made via his previous banner DETAiLFILM, which he founded in 2007 with fellow German producer Henning Kamm, whom he met while studying at the prestigious Atelier Ludwigsburg-Paris post graduate program for international productions. That company also co-produced Mia Hansen-Løve’s Berlin Silver Bear-winner Things to Come. While Kamm and Gasmia have since amicably parted ways, it is a relationship that Gasmia says “he will never forget.”
“Finding amazing partners to work with long term is very important to me,” says Gasmia, who is also the German partner for Zentropa’s Hamburg outpost. “When I was thinking of what to do next, I saw that almost all of the exciting directors in Germany that I knew at that time and who I really wanted to work with all had their own company. I knew that if I fished in that pond, it wouldn’t necessarily be the right way to do it, so I decided to do it with more of an international approach.”
In 2018, Gasmia teamed up with German directors Julia von Heinz, Erik Schmitt and David Wnendt to launch Seven Elephants, a Berlin-based production company that was inspired by fellow Berlin banner X Filme Creative Pool. The aim was to unite creative production and directing talent under one roof.
“I had made a list of directors that I adored for their boldness in creativity and uncompromising emotion they could trigger in cinema, something that I find very important,” he says. “And that list came down to Julia, Erik and David.”
Von Heinz was known for her projects Nothing Else Matters, Hanni and Nanni 2 and I’m Off Then, the latter two taking $5.7M and $15.2M in Germany respectively while Wnendt was reputed for his coming-of-age movie Wetlands, which premiered in Sundance in 2014, as well as Hitler satire Look Who’s Back. Schmitt, at the time, was known for his extensive short film catalogue and whose films had been selected at more than 300 festivals.
The first film out of the Seven Elephants gate would be Von Heinz’s drama And Tomorrow the Entire World, which premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival and was later selected as Germany’s official submission for the International Oscar.
Since then, the company has gone on to make films such as Wnendt’s Sun and Concrete, an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Felix Lobrecht, which premiered at Berlinale Special in 2023 and Treasure, which marked Von Heinz’s English-language debut and premiered in Berlin this year. Gasmia produces the project with Heinz for Seven Elephants along with Dunham for Good Thing Going Productions while co-producers are Haiku Films, Kings&Queens Filmproduktion and Lava Films.
Bleecker Street is releasing the latter theatrically in the U.S. on June 14 and Glen Basner’s FilmNation has been representing international sales on that project. “They’ve been really great partners and knew exactly how to position this film,” says Gasmia.
Personal treasure
For Gasmia, Treasure is a particularly special and personal project. The film, which is set in 1991, sees Holocaust survivor and father (Fry) and stubborn daughter (Dunham) reunite, reconcile and chart a course for Poland to visit the father’s family home the moment the iron curtain falls. When the project was brought to him at script stage (Von Heinz writes with John Quester and Lily Brett), Gasmia recalls reflecting on his own father – an Algerian war refugee who fled to Europe – when reading it. At the time, he had just started Seven Elephants and that same year his father had sadly passed away.
“I was struck by the themes that were very similar to my own biography,” says Gasmia. “It’s about a daughter who doesn’t get any answers from her father about where she comes from and that felt very familiar to me. My father never said a single word about Algeria. He just said, ‘No, let’s look forward, let’s move on.’ And the main character Ruth [Dunham] was dealing with the same emptiness – she knows her dad survived the Holocaust and he’s from Poland but that’s about it.”
He continues: “What really drew me to the project was that it’s not only very touching and very profound, but also you can smile and laugh at the same time and that’s something Julia von Heinz is so good at. It’s very hard getting the right mix of drama and comedy without it feeling awkward and I think she’s the best in the German-language world to do that.”
Having Dunham and Fry sign up to the European arthouse independent film was, he says, a testament to the material. Treasure is also one of the few projects that has ever been permitted to shoot in Auschwitz and even with Fry and Dunham aboard, he admits financing the project was a challenge at time. But structuring it as a German-French co-production (something the producer is well-versed in), meant the $9M project was able to lean into both German and French finance systems. “They actually did a great job,” he says. “Together, both systems accounted for more than 80% of the budget.”
It’s a model that Gasmia feels confident will prevail in the independent film arena – films that are targeted to local audiences but that also have global scale. “Because the films we make are uncompromising, that’s a great ingredient. It’s not enough to just cater to your home market – you need to be able to cater to other markets and this comes from great storytelling.”
Coming up, Seven Elephants recently announced two new projects: Athos 2646 from director Wnendt and The Life of Wishes, set to be directed by Schmitt.
Based on Nils Westerboer’s award-winning novel, Athos 2646 is an ambitious project which Wnendt will write and direct and is set in the distant future, where a mysterious crime unfolds on the lonely Neptune moon of Athos. An artificial intelligence responsible for life support is suspected of murder and an inquisitor specializing in AI is sent to solve the case. Seven Elephants is producing the project, which is backed by German giant Constantin Film.
German actor Matthias Schweighöfer (who recently starred in Oscar-winning title Oppenheimer) is set to star in The Life of Wishes, a project based on Thomas Glavinic’s best-selling novel Das Leben Der Wuensche. It follows a disillusioned family man who is lost in a world where more is always better. When given the power to grant his every wish, he soon becomes confronted with his own dark and unconscious desires. Pantaleon Films and ProU Producers United Film will produce with Seven Elephants will co-producing the project with SevenPictures Film.
“With all of our films, we want to make sure that they all somehow have the same values and therefore somehow the same identity,” he says. “At our core, we are often political, but it’s always story first.”
German Renaissance and French ties
While Gasmia is cognizant of the challenges facing independent producers with shrinking budgets coupled with sharp inflation requiring producers “to do more with less”, but he’s optimistic of where he sits in the global indie puzzle and points to the being based in Germany as a real plus point in the current market.
“Germany has great tools, and they are about to become even greater,” says Gasmia. “By early next year, our whole funding system will be overhauled and become more effective. And while money is of course important – especially in the independent film world, which is drying up rapidly – we also have great teams who are used to working on big Hollywood blockbusters. And we can do smaller films on a budget. For example, if you’ve got a film with a great IP or great screenplay at say, $4M or $5M, then sometimes you only need to find $1M or $2M and we can find the rest of it.”
He points to big brands like Studio Babelsberg and a “great sense of creative freedom” in German as being appealing for American and international talent. “Germany is so welcoming to people in the business and with everything we do here, we learn better. We serve whatever is needed to be served and with every director that is using that system and combining that system with American talent and international talent, we become strong.”
He adds: “I think the Renaissance of German cinema is somehow coming. In 1927 and 1928 there was a huge boom of entertainment in the German world and then, for reasons we all know, people left.”
Additionally, Gasmia has a strong tie to France and French cinema. He spent childhood summers in France, is married to a French woman and his father, as he would later find out, was born in France. “I find this weirdly fascinating because I could feel his struggle with France all of his life and that we wanted to be a part of it, but he clearly wasn’t.”
For him, this cultural tie to France is something he cherishes deeply and last year, Gasmia was elected to be the President of the Franco-German Film Academy. “I feel a responsibility for the friendship of these two countries.”
Indeed, two of the three films that have come out of the Seven Elephants banner have been minority French co-productions (And Tomorrow the Entire World and Treasure). Without his French partner, Thomas Jaeger at Paris-based outfit Haiku Films, he says he “would not have been able to close the financing of these films and it gives me goosebumps when I see these films now.”
Looking ahead, Gasmia is optimistic of where Seven Elephants and the indie film game is headed. “I see this as a great chance. There is a re-shift happening in the market and I think companies that survive this will survive for many years to come. We need to remember to be truly innovative and playful and not forget that we are not doing this for our egos or our finances – we are doing this to marvel audiences.”
Treasure hits U.S. and UK theatres on June 14.
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