Germany’s DCM Takes Stake in Wim Wenders’ Road Movies

Berlin-based producer/distributor DCM has taken a sake in Wim Wenders‘ production company Road Movies, creating an “equal, strong partnership” between the two firms, Wenders and DCM said Friday.

DCM, which has released several of Wenders’ films in Germany, including the Oscar-nominated Perfect Days, will buy into Road Movies in the first quarter of this year. DCM partners Dario Suter, Christoph Daniel, Marc Schmidheiny and Joel Brandeis described the move as a strategic expansion of the company’s film production business. Schmidheiny will be named Road Movies’ managing director.

Schmidheiny described the partnership as “a dream come true,” saying DCM would handle the financial and day-to-day management of Road Movies to “to create the space for Wim to bring his seemingly inexhaustible creative power to the screen.”

“It has been on the agenda for years that we would work together with a strong partner,” said Wenders. “As Road Movies, we have an eventful past as one of the oldest independent production companies in German-speaking countries, but for some time now we have been far too small for what we produced, but then again too big to easily bridge the development phase between films. With DCM we have now found the partner we were hoping for, people with the highest integrity, creative and film-loving people who have built a production and distribution company under whose roof I can better concentrate on future projects.”

The 78-year-old Wenders is enjoying a late-career boom, receiving an Oscar nomination in the best international feature category for Perfect Days, his Tokyo-set drama starring Koji Yakusho as a philosophical toilet cleaner. Perfect Days premiered in Cannes, where Yakusho won the best actor prize, as did Wenders’ Anselm, a 3D documentary about German artist Anselm Kiefer. DCM released both films in Germany and turned Perfect Days into a bonafide arthouse hit, earning close to $2.5 million in the territory. Under the new deal, DCM will release all of Wenders’ films in Germany.

The company first worked with Wenders on The Secret of Places, a documentary about the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.

Founded in 2008, DCM is one of Germany’s leading indie distributors and has handled the local release of such crossover hits as The Artist, Moonlight, and I, Tonya as well as producing and releasing the hugely-successful German family film franchise Bibi & Tini. Their latest feature, Soleen Yusef’s Sieger Sein has its world premiere Friday as the opening film of the Generation section of the Berlin Film Festival. The company also has a stake in Thorsten Schumacher’s London-based film sales company Rocket Science and in the New York arthouse theater Metrograph.

Wenders founded Road Movies in 1976 and the company has produced or co-produced more than 100 features and documentaries, by Wenders and other directors, including Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, and Buena Vista Social Club, Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham and Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen.

In addition to features and documentaries, Wenders also produces 3D art installations through Road Movies, including recent ones on the work of Edward Hopper and Claudine Drai.

“He might be almost 80 but Wim has the energy and curiosity of a 20-year-old,” says Schmidheiny. “We just want to help him make as many movies as he can and help bring them to the world.”

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