With a lot of creative energy: our interview at THE SPOT

THE SPOT media & film covers cinema, television and streaming, the numbers, the releases and the people behind them. Barbara Schuster sent us a few questions for their interview section. It went online today, under the line „Mit viel kreativer Energie“. Having a trade publication ask about a company that has existed for a year and a half is not a given. We were glad, and we answered honestly.

We are GmbH, founded in February 2025, and [k]eine agentur belongs to us as well. Behind it are three filmmakers from Hamburg: Jakob Hermann Hähner, Johannes Fielers and Lino Kalkhoff. The reason was simple enough. We wanted to help build German film and television culture instead of watching it happen, and to make entertainment that is still there after the credits roll.

The two halves work into each other. The agency takes feature films and series and puts them where they belong, with campaign and marketing work. The production side develops and shoots.

We founded the company to be able to realise our own material according to our own values. The most important one is unspectacular: people first. We want to build a house where people do not work for the company but with it, and where there is room for their own handwriting. That is not a perk on top. It is the condition for the work turning out well.

Which is why we rethink production logic. The way things run on set is part of it, and so are the structures behind it that hardly anyone touches, because that is simply how they have always been. Both are still shifting here, and they should be.

[k]eine agentur develops digital and social media campaigns that are thought through before the first day of shooting. [k]eine produktion then carries them out. That sounds like a formality and makes all the difference. Anyone who starts on the campaign after the shoot works with whatever is left over. Think it through beforehand and you end up with material that was made for the film, instead of leftovers that somehow have to become a trailer.

Most recently we worked at the „Servus München“ party of the Bavaria Studios, as a partner at Filmfest München. Two things stayed with us. First: how it goes when two professional teams work towards one goal and nobody fights over who is in charge. The second has to do with reach. At an evening like that the guests in the room count, and so does everyone joining digitally. Invited or tuning in, being there is what matters.

Thank you to Michael Hilscher and his team for the collaboration. How the evening went on our end, from the concept to the work on site, is covered in detail in our piece on „Servus München“.

Over the coming weeks and months there are several campaigns lined up with the agency, for distributors and production companies. On the development side we are working on several features and series in parallel and looking to place them with the right distributors. We are also submitting for development funding at MOIN Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein this year. What is waiting there is bigger than anything we have taken on so far. That is all we are saying for now.

The last question was the one we needed longest for. Jakob plays tennis, swims and likes nothing better than sitting around with close friends, which usually means half the company is at the table too. Then there are the small independent cinemas he goes to in order to refill. Lino cooks with friends, laughs a lot, plays with language and invents running jokes. And still watches a great many films, ideally in a cinema. Johannes spends his free time on sport, at the cinema and with the people closest to him, preferably all at once. Although it never quite works without a camera in his hands.

Thank you to Barbara Schuster and the editorial team at THE SPOT for the questions. The full interview, in German, is over at THE SPOT media & film.