ARD has received another open letter, this time from the Bundesverband Regie. The reason given by the association’s board members is: “The way in which directors in Germany are put under pressure in their work has reached a level that is no longer acceptable.”
In the previous week, as now the directors, the scriptwriters have already turned to the new ARD program director Christine Strobl. The Association of German Scriptwriters complains in its open letter that its members are systematically denied a say and participation in many public film projects, and therefore demands binding guidelines for future artistic cooperation. Such guidelines already exist, but they are only informal in nature and would be consistently undermined, according to the Executive Board.
The public broadcasters get to feel the concentrated displeasure of the creative
A few days earlier, hundreds of radio play authors had already met complained about financial exploitation in an open letter and noted a continuous deterioration in working conditions. The public broadcasters and, above all, the ARD are experiencing great resentment from different directions by artists and creative people who produce valuable programs for the broadcasters. The topic is either the precariousness of creative work or the incapacitation of artists. Sometimes both.
In its letter to ARD program director Christine Strobl, the Bundesverband Regie lists a “series of unfortunate developments”: “The scripts almost always come too late, questions about staging possibilities and artistic expertise, the general conditions of the work or budget realism almost never posed. ” In addition, it is praiseworthy that the maximum daily working time was reduced two years ago. In fact, since then, this has meant that there are two fewer days of shooting available for a television game. Neither in the budget nor in the content was there any reaction, so the directors’ objection, let alone with compensation through more shooting days.
The board of the association, to which the directors Michael Chauvistré, Matthias Greving, Cornelia Grünberg, Stefan Hering, Sibylle Kappes, Michael Schäfer and Satu Siegemund belong, emphasizes in its open letter that it wants to solve the problems constructively: “Better films are not made by Demands are raised or threatened, they arise in cooperation and in the agreement on what can be improved and realized. “
At the end of the letter there is an actually banal sentence: “Demanding respect for one’s own work also means that one must be able to show respect for the work of others.” However, the authors and directors are increasingly missing this respect on the part of broadcasters and editors.