cine plus co-production 'RHYTHM IS IT! wins two prizes at the German Film Award

Berlin, 11 July 2005/
After winning the Bavarian Film Award at the beginning of the year, the music documentary RHYTHM IS IT! picked up two prizes at the German Film Award last Friday: "Best Documentary Film" (for the producers Thomas Grube, Uwe Dierks and Andrea Thilo) and "Best Editing" (Dirk Grau and Martin Hoffmann).

"We are particularly pleased about the film's success and congratulate everyone involved. The fact that this was not a 'lonely' decision has been confirmed by the well over 500,000 cinemagoers who have gone to see this unusual documentary in the meantime. Furthermore, RHYTHM IS IT! was in the cinema charts' top 25 for 20 weeks, making it the most successful German documentary for years," said Frank Evers, co-producer and managing director of the cine plus Group. For five months, the directors Thomas Grube and Enrique Sánchez Lansch accompanied the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and its chief conductor Sir Simon Rattle. The result was 200 hours of material, shot with up to four HD simultaneously and on DV cam. Frank Evers again: "At the same time, these awards are great confirmation for us in our efforts to increase our activities as a co-production partner on high-quality and promising production projects, where we focus on using such innovative technologies as HD to improve (for instance) the look of a film. The aim is to boost the film's visual quality and thus its later chances of success – without breaking the production budget."
RHYTHM IS IT! is a BOOMTOWNMEDIA Berlin production (Uwe Dierks), a co-production with cine plus (Frank Evers) and RBB/ARTE (Dorothea Diekmann/Sören Schumann). It is distributed by Pifflmedien and was funded by the MEDIABOARD Berlin-Brandenburg and the FFA (German Federal Film Board).