Wiedemann & Berg Film Production
Wiedemann & Berg Film is a German film production company founded by Max Wiedemann and Quirin Berg in 2003. The company's first movie The Lives of Others won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007.
History
In 2003, while still studying at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, Max Wiedemann and Quirin Berg founded Wiedemann & Berg Film.In December 2009, Wiedemann & Berg Film announced that they had entered into TV production a launching a joint-venture with Dutch-based production and distribution company Endemol under their Endemol Germany division which was named Wiedemann & Berg Television with their W&B Film founders Quirin Berg and Max Wiedemann jointly managing W&B Film's television joint venture arm.
In April 2019, American-based global investment company Kohlberg Kravis Roberts announced that they had brought Wiedemann & Berg Film Production following the former company's acquisitions of three other German companies with W&B's television division joint venture with Endemol Shine Germany being excluded from the sale will continue to run as a separate production company.
Since January 2020, both companies are part of the studio Leonine. Both Wiedemann and Berg are shareholders and founding members of the studio and, as Leonine Holding's managing directors and chief production officers, lead the group's entire fiction production.
Their first feature film was directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, titled The Lives of Others. It received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007, followed by Never Look Away, which was nominated for two Academy Awards in 2019. Other cinematic features include Baran bo Odar's thriller Who am I and Simon Verhoeven's comedy Welcome to Germany, which had over 3 million theatergoers in 2016. Nightlife, which opened in theaters on February 13, 2020, marked the fifth collaboration with Simon Verhoeven.
Next to traditional production formats for free TV or linear television, Wiedemann & Berg has also positioned itself as the first German company within the new market of pay television and video on demand. In 2012, the first German self-produced pay TV show was created for TNT Serie, followed by 4 Blocks. Wiedemann & Berg also produced Dark, the first German Netflix Original and Pagan Peak, one of the first originals for Sky Deutschland. Tribes of Europa is another series that's being produced for Netflix.
Max Wiedemann and Quirin Berg are members of Deutsche Filmakademie, British Film Academy as well as European Film Academy.