Shoot is underway on Beta Film’s high-end drama series Empire Oktoberfest (working title) by Hannu Salonen (Arctic Circle).
The six-hour series about the fierce battle between two family breweries, set in Munich in 1900, stars Mišel Maticevic (Babylon Berlin), Martina Gedeck (The Lives Of Others) and up-and-coming talents Klaus Steinbacher (Das Boot) and Mercedes Mueller (Passenger 23).
The drama sheds light on a chapter in the history of the world-famous, iconic German beer festival, where Munich’s powerful secretly carry out their affairs. The show portrays two beer-brewing dynasties fight for domination of the famous event and revolves around a young girl who falls in love with a poor brewer’s son. Their feelings are against her father’s wishes – a rich mobster, who has come to town to try and bully his way into the inner circle of Munich’s brewery dynasties. Soon, blood is being shed and the young brewer has to fight desperately to protect his own family from his love’s father.
Shooting in Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and Prague, the Zeitsprung/Violet Pictures-production will be wrapped mid-August. Gomorrah and Babylon Berlin sales outfit Beta Film handles world sales and will present first images at MIPCOM in Cannes this fall. It is made in co-production with BR, ARD Degeto, WDR and MDR for Das Erste, supported by FFF Bayern, Film-und Medienstiftung NRW and German Motion Picture Fund.
Producers Michael Souvignier, Till Derenbach and Alexis von Wittgenstein said, “The power-obsessed milieu of Munich’s breweries in 1900 is a fascinating setting for a series. The contrast between roughness, gloom and the ease of the world-famous Schwabing bohemia with eccentric artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Thomas Mann is a great, exciting stage for a family epic of Shakespearian scale.”
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