Director's Portrait:
Ilona Ziok - Champion Of The Light Touch
Ilona Ziok
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Ilona Ziok was born in Gliwice/Poland and emigrated to England, while still a young girl, where she went to boarding school. With Polish and English as her two languages, she first had to cope with learning German when she came to Germany in the 1970s. Continuing to develop and build on her childhood interest in theater, she studied, during various periods, in Moscow, New York and Frankfurt. Armed with a German government grant, it was while again studying theater in Moscow that she discovered the medium of film through Mikhail Kalatozov's Letyat Zhuravli (Cranes Are Flying, 1957), a filmed adaptation of Viktor Rosov's 1956 play, Vechno Zhivye (Forever Alive). Back in Germany in 1989, she worked until 1991 at Hessischer Rundfunk as a journalist in the Culture and Politics/Society departments. On a spur of a moment decision, she left Frankfurt and moved to Berlin, where she met and married her husband, the minimal musician and composer, Manuel Goettsching. Together, they run the production company CV Films and the music label, MG. ART. Apart from teaching and lecturing for MEDIA Europe and in New York, she is a prolific filmmaker, directing and producing documentaries for cinema and television as well as features. A selection of her internationally awarded films includes: Special Olympics in Minneapolis (1991), Journey to Tunesia (1992), Wo ist die Strasse, Wo ist das Haus - Eine Reise mit meiner Tochter nach Schlesien (1993), Kurt Gerrons Karussell (1999), The Count and the Comrade (2005), and The Sounds of Silents (2005). She has also (co)-produced: Corridorius (1995), La Legion Etrangere (1997), the mini-series Die Buehnenrepublik (2003), Salvador Allende (2004), and The Nomi Song (2004).
Contact: CV Films Fuggerstrasse 24 10777 Berlin/Germany phone +49-30-23 62 71 67 fax +49-30-2 13 59 77  cvfilmsberlin@aol.com www.ashra.com
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Is Ilona Ziok is a serious lady with a great sense of humor or a humorous lady with a serious streak? She's both!
«Humor is very important to me,» she says. «My favorite film is Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be and I love the English sense of humor. My films are first and foremost entertaining: The themes might be heavy but the touch is always light.»
Of her OSCAR-nominated and international award-winning Kurt Gerrons Karussell, her powerful mixture of music, cabaret and death, Ziok says: «I was told that one simply does not mix that.» But the reviews and viewer reaction confirmed Ziok's belief that if the audience is entertained it will watch, listen, learn and react. «Of course it's a sad film,» she says, «but it entertains too, and at the end, people still cry.»
For a woman whose first love was the theater, who came to film by accident, Ziok has since imbued herself with the structures of Hollywood filmmaking and applies the three act structure of a fiction film to her documentaries.
«I want a story that can be entertaining and also accessible,» says Ziok. «I use a feature structure because I like documentaries, or whatever I'm producing or directing, to lead somewhere. If I'm watching something and not knowing where it's going, what the point of it is, then I get bored quickly and I don't want to do that to my audience. The Americans understand this, few Germans do. And as long as there are still contemporary witnesses I find interesting then, as a director, I'd rather make documentaries even if I've studied fiction.»
Purists will look at her style and some will say it disqualifies her from calling herself a «documentarymaker». But life is not all Discovery Channel or finger-waving public broadcaster pontificating. Besides, says Ziok, «I'm always interested in new forms, and not just in film. I've had interest from Broadway to turn Karussell into a musical.»
Ziok has a unique perspective. Her father, a German aristocrat, was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance, she was raised in England, and is equally at home in the United States. She's polyglot and polynational.
Her sense of differentiation also leads her to striking a balance, as best exemplified in The Count and the Comrade about a German aristocrat and a Communist in the resistance.
«I showed the rough cut to both sides at the same time,» says Ziok. «They both found it so balanced yet so neutral. I didn't want to interpret them, I just let them portray themselves. I wanted to find the balance even though the film shows they can never be friends. Class comes between them.»
There's a seminal moment in the film when the aristocrat talks with the Communists at the gates of the mansion. «This is so beautiful,» says one. The aristocrat answers, «If you had this, you wouldn't be a Communist.» As Ziok herself says, «some things cannot be reconciled.»
Ziok already has interest from the US about making a feature on the same subject and she has been asked to write the script.
Like any decent filmmaker, she is fired up by certain subjects and has the burning desire to realize them. One of these is the life and never properly explained 1968 death of state prosecutor Fritz Bauer, who brought the Auschwitz trial to Frankfurt, just before he was to shine a doubtlessly unwelcome light on Germany's legal and medical profession during the Nazi years.
«This will be a real crime film,» says Ziok, «because I'm examining his death and so narrating his life - simple, but effective!»
«Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, it's very hard to finance,» agrees Ziok. «The BKM has rejected it twice.»
But the financing is coming together, including from the Bundespresseamt («The first film they've financed,» says Ziok proudly), the Hessen Film Fund, and Saarlandischer Rundfunk, Germany's smallest public broadcaster. Ziok has produced some successful films with the commissioning editor of SR, Dr. Michael Meyer, and loves to work with him. Sadly, this collaboration is their last due to his early retirement.
Apropos money, the bane of every filmmaker, Ziok is perhaps a blessed exception to the rule: «I always get money,» she laughs, «but never enough! That's why my films take so long to be realized!»
She is also quick and generous with her praise for those who have contributed to her success.
«I've been saved by Eurimages. Ms. Renate Roginas is a wonderful person and understands films, as does my sales agent, Transit Film,» she says. «I've had very good experience with them. I really appreciate Loy Arnold and Susanne Schumann's work!»
An accomplished and respected filmmaker, Ziok has won a great many awards - and didn't want to talk about them! Suffice to say, the list includes an OSCAR nomination, Banff's Rocky Award, awards at Telluride and numerous critics' awards.
A self-proclaimed «master of smalltalk» who «can only deal with tough themes through film, I could never talk about them», her list of upcoming projects is, well, typically Ziok-eclectic.
First out of the film gate will be The Sounds of Silents, a look at 101-year old Willy Sommerfield, the world's last surviving silent film accompanist from the 1920s.
«It's my first film which has been generously subsidized,» says Ziok. «By Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and, of course, MEDIA and Eurimages, like all my features.»
She is also working with US colleague and author Shareen Brizac on a film about Mildred Harnack and Martha Dodd, two Americans with the anti-Nazi resistance, and a musical about Fillmore West-founder and famous rock impressario Bill Graham who discovered Hendrix, Santana, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. He was a Jew who emigrated from Berlin in 1933, otherwise he'd have shared Gerron's fate.
Her other projects include ballet in Moscow and Tokyo and her husband's concerts in the US, England and Japan, while for ARTE France she's working on a Jules Verne theme evening.
In pre-production is the fiction Lilly (a Polish-German co-production with Jacek Blawut directing) and her own feature Sing a Song of Socialism, which tells the origins of the German Democratic Republic through songs. A comedy about her husband, «Killing Manuel» (sic), will follow, Ziok says, «Goethe's motto of 'The spirits I summon I can never be rid of'.» Billy Wilder used this principle with 1,2,3. I'm co-writing with an Englishwoman, Alison Hindhaugh, who is also very funny.»
And we're back to humor again.