At the Tokyo International Film Festival, the German director said her Berlinale-premiered film lost up to 20 minutes, and spoke about rising production costs and Germany's film funding model.
German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger said at the Tokyo International Film Festival, which is hosting a retrospective of her work, that her vampire film "The Blood Countess" ("Die Blutgräfin") lost as much as 20 minutes against her wishes. In the film, which premiered at the Berlinale in February, Isabelle Huppert plays a vampire countess who resurfaces in present-day Vienna, with Lars Eidinger and Birgit Minichmayr co-starring. Ottinger said her preferred version ran 15 to 20 minutes longer. "The film originally had a wonderful rhythm, exactly as it was. Then I began cutting it because everyone was forcing me to. Once I started shortening it, the rhythm no longer worked," she said, adding that she then had to recut the whole film to restore its balance and that, from her point of view, it is now perfect.
Ottinger described the film as the most expensive she has ever made. She had wanted 40 shooting days but the production gave her 30, and her crew topped 100 people, whereas she said she would rather have worked with half that number and more days. She attributed the high cost to extensive safety measures, saying some are very important but many are "completely excessive, senseless and bureaucratic." When she produced her own films, she said, she could make them at high quality for 2.5 to 3 million euros, while today meeting all requirements means a budget of no less than 7 to 8 million euros, which is why she no longer produces her own films. She added that Huppert had stayed with the project for 20 years.
At the same event, Barbara Wurm, the Austrian head of the Berlinale's Forum section, discussed German film funding. She noted that since January 1, 2025, production support from the federal film board FFA has been allocated automatically based on a film's admissions and festival success, replacing the board's own jury selection, and said this model favors a small number of films receiving large amounts of money. The Forum is not on the FFA's festival reference list, she said, so films screened there do not receive this funding. Variety also reported that culture minister Wolfram Weimer nearly doubled government economic film funding to 250 million euros for 2026, money that has already been used up, while the 2027 budget draft plans about 200 million euros, subject to parliamentary approval.
