A portrait of producers Claudia Steffen & Christoph Friedel

“We really complement each other with our different backgrounds,” says Claudia Steffen, man–aging director of Cologne-based Pandora Film Produktion, about her working relationship with fellow shareholder Christoph Friedel. “Neither of us may have had any formal training in film production, but I’d been able to try my hand at making films at a film club when I was growing up in Rostock in former East Germany,” she recalls.

Christoph, on the other hand, had worked for various film distributors after graduating from university and was subsequently hired by Dieter Kosslick to oversee the funding programmes for distribution and exhibition at the Filmstiftung NRW before a meeting with Pandora’s co-founder Karl “Baumi” Baumgartner then led to him joining the company in 1998, the same year as Claudia. “Whenever I watched films as a teenager, I had always felt this desire to want to help the artists realise their visions. That’s what made the idea of becoming a producer so appealing,” Christoph explains. “Our role as producers is to be a facili­tator,” Claudia says. “We are not what is often called a creative producer, i.e. some­one who develops an idea for a film and then packages the project with a director and screenwriter. What we do is bring directors, writers and actors together for a film.”

“Our approach is to ask the directors and screenwriters what kind of film they want to make and then see how we can make this possible for them,” she continues. “At Pandora, it’s never about the kind of film we want to make. Of course, we individually contribute our experi­ence and input to each project and to every phase of the filmmaking.”

When the two joined the Pandora team, the company had already built up a reputation for championing ambitious international arthouse cinema through its production and distribution operations. “That was still a time when world cinema could achieve significant numbers in the cinemas,” Christoph recalls, noting that LUNA PAPA posted 170,000 admissions, SAMSARA was seen by over 200,000 cinema-goers in Germany. “It was a different market 30 years ago, but things are completely different now,” Claudia observes. “You now have more films sharing the market, so this is why we started changing the kind of projects we come onboard to produce, and this is a development which we had already started even before Baumi’s passing in 2014.”

So, the company moved towards producing more German films, beginning with the debut features such filmmakers as Pia Marais, Jan Schomburg and Switzerland’s Michael Koch and then going on to work with established directors like Andreas Dresen, Christian Schwochow, Lars Jessen and Thomas Stuber. Jessen`s latest feature film A STROLL TO SYRACUSE and Koch`s EROSION are both in post and should premiere at major festivals in 2026. However, that doesn’t mean Pandora isn’t still open to being a partner on international co-productions as two recent projects show.

“Sometimes, it stems from personal curiosity,” Christoph explains. “That’s the case with Albert Serra’s current feature film OUT OF THIS WORLD because it interests us artistically how he works innovatively with the medium.” And Christoph’s long standing connection with Latin American cinema has seen Pandora reunited with the Paraguayan filmmaker Marcelo Martinessi for his second feature NARCISCO now premiering at this year’s Berlinale. Looking back on their almost three decades at the company as Pandora prepares to throw a party in Berlin to celebrate its 44 years in the film business, Claudia and Christoph say that three of the productions they handled stand out as “personal milestones”.

“My experiences on the shoot of Pan Nalin’s SAMSARA in India had an impact on me that has lasted through to the present day,” Claudia recalls. “And GUNDERMANN, our first collaboration with Andreas Dresen, one of the most relevant of contemporary German filmmakers, has since become a classic in German cinema.” Meanwhile, Christoph points to Martinessi’s 2018 Berlinale winner THE HEIRESSES as “an example of a film that can have a political impact in a country as conservative as Paraguay and succeed in having a lasting effect on how its society now views same-sex relationships.”

Martin Blaney