Everything begins with the theme, the story, the actual starting point of each documentary journey. The themes are supposed to lie on the road, on the side of the road. Perhaps they are remnants of the last story. But that’s what makes them so difficult to identify. Often the right story feels like a crazy idea at the first moment. You think you’ve gone completely mad. When I developed the idea to visit my Turkish father, whom I had only seen once for a brief moment as a child, in Turkey at the age of 36 and to accompany this with the camera, it felt as if the story did not really want to belong to me. It was the starting point of a journey that implied “failure”. I knew nothing about my father. I had nothing in my hand, just an old photograph showing him with my mother. I didn’t know where he lived. I didn’t know if I would like him, how strange he would be to me, or if he would even receive me. I didn’t even know if he was still alive. I only had my mother’s diary, in which she describes how she met my father, then a guest worker, in 1966 in Stuttgart and how he went back to his family in Turkey after a year-long love story and left my mother and me behind. I had just been born and he was already married. When I hesitantly told the ARD editor the idea of this film, I was filled with shame. Was this really a story for ARD? Could one even guess how it would end? But to my astonishment the idea met with great approval. The editor encouraged me, she trusted me, and so a crazy idea turned into a documentary that tells my story.

It is precisely this trust – whether coming from outside or inside – that is the central prerequisite for tracking down every good story. If you don’t yet have the confidence yourself, which is rather the normal case, trust given to you from outside can work wonders. But to give trust also always means to accept a possible failure, or rather to see in failure a creative chance and to be ready to change the path eventually. When I was shooting the film “Where Money Grows”, a film about the stock company EMTV, which was listed on the Neuer Markt and had already increased by 10,000 percent since its launch, the company founders Florian and Homas Haffa suddenly cancelled all interviews for the film. The share price had gone down and the brothers were no longer prepared for interviews. But because the brothers once came from the small hop village of Pfaffenhofen, where hundreds of hop growers invested in the EM TV share, we decided to tell the film from the perspective of the hop growers and the savings bank that made the share big at that time. It probably became the better film, a “sign of the times”, which only became an unusual story because of the cancelled interviews.

For me, most gripping stories have one thing in common: they tell about creating the “impossible”. They have surprising twists and turns and they are a plea for having the courage to live your dreams. Good stories need trust.

DEFA Stiftung

Marcus Vetter is a director of the classic school of committed documentary film, Cinéma Vérité, and can be mentioned in the same breath as the greats of the genre. His works on economic connections and phenomena of the German economy are among the best German cinema and television has to offer. They bear witness to a high level of expertise and make complex economic and social interrelationships easy for the viewer to understand. Early on, for example, they named the mechanisms that led to the bursting of the Internet bubble at the turn of the millennium and, in autumn 2008, to the biggest global economic crisis since 1929.

Marcus Vetter succeeds in entertaining and arousing emotions despite the difficult subject matter, as he finds people who get involved themselves or at least try to get a small piece of the cake when the big profits are distributed. Or are stunned by the whole game. He gets close to them and justifies their trust by never exposing them, but letting them be themselves.

Dokumentarfilm Info

Marcus Vetter began his career as a freelance editor and author at Südwestrundfunk. From 1997 he also realized his own projects such as “Der Tunnel” (1999), for which he won a Grimme Prize. He was also awarded this coveted television prize for “Wo das Geld wächst” (2000) and “Broadway Bruchsal” (2001), which he shot together with Dominik Wessely. At the media talk in Stuttgart he also explained in detail the problems of individual productions. Whether the main protagonists jumped off at short notice, broadcasters demanded a different title or suddenly had difficulties because his protagonist did not speak German. As a result, he has been producing his films on an independent basis for ten years now, but receives regular support from broadcasters such as SWR, Arte, NDR, BR, WDR as well as numerous regional and national film subsidies.

Thematically and stylistically he is open and it is entirely up to the story and the theme how he creates a film: Whether with or without commentary, what role the music plays or what aesthetic style is chosen for the images. Therefore, at first glance there is no uniform handwriting that could be recognized as “Marcus Vetter style”.