Student feature film ‘White Cherry’ celebrates its cinema premiere

Public screening at Cinemotion Bremerhaven on 11 October at 2 pm

Exclusive premiere for students at Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences on 11 October at 11:45 a.m.

A crime thriller ‘made in Bremerhaven’: Bremerhaven students Julian Otten, Joram Hartmann and Thomas Neubronner have made a feature film for their bachelor's thesis in the Digital Media Production degree programme. Their work ‘White Cherry’ is now celebrating its cinema premiere as part of the orientation week at Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences. All interested parties are invited to the screening on Friday, 11 October at 2 pm at Cinemotion Bremerhaven (Karlsburg 1). The number of seats is limited. To register, please send an email to jbo98@gmx.de.

Private detective Cherry returns to her home town. She wants to solve the attack on her brother, a journalist. She is supported by a policeman friend. However, the two have different moral views and clash in their investigations. This is the plot of the one-hour feature film. Even though the film team had already gained experience in producing films during their studies, this project was something special for them. ‘‘White Cherry’ is not just a work sample for our team. We had already made several short films together during our studies and were keen to try our hand at a medium-length feature film. We shot on land and at sea, experimented with black light, staged a martial arts fight with a trained stunt fighter and tried our hand at dialogue with professional actors. After all this work, we really want to bring our film to the public and talk to people,’ says Julian Otten, who was responsible for the film's screenplay, direction and production.

The film was shot in Bremerhaven, Bremen and on the Baltic Sea. To convey the right mood, the lighting was also of particular importance. ‘For ‘White Cherry’, it was important to us to create an authentic and gloomy atmosphere on a visual level. To achieve this, we placed a number of visible light sources at the filming locations. This allowed the actors to move around the set more freely and the camera to switch between different shooting positions even more quickly. The anamorphic lenses from Schneider Kreuznach enabled us to achieve a very unique cinema look and bring our creative vision to the screen,’ explains cameraman Joram Hartmann.

However, the students not only put a lot of thought into the lighting, but also the music. This was Thomas Neubronner's task: ‘’White Cherry' was an incredibly exciting project for me, as it was my first time composing the soundtrack for a complete film and I had a lot of fun creating recurring motifs and a holistic atmosphere.’ The sound work during the shoot was an exciting but also challenging task for him: ‘Full concentration was always required during the recordings on set. Paying attention to background noise during filming, keeping the sound boom out of the frame and focussed on the actors was - at times physically - quite exhausting. But the finished film is worth all the effort!’

Now that all the work on ‘White Cherry’ has been completed, the film team is looking forward to the cinema premiere in Bremerhaven. ‘Realising such a complex film project as ‘White Cherry’ was an enormous learning experience for us, where we had to surpass ourselves time and again and deal with unexpected challenges. After all this work, it's really great to be able to see the final result on the big screen,’ says Joram Hartmann.

The film project was funded by the ‘Cash for Culture’ youth culture fund of the Bremerhaven Cultural Office and the ‘Microförderung’ (micro-grant) of the Bremen Film Office. Supporters included Schneider Kreuznach, the hairdressing salon Handwerk Bremerhaven, the Rocking Horse Ranch, the proAktiv fitness studio, Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences, the Sushi Grill & Bar restaurant, WERK. Bremerhaven, the Gesundheit NORD Klinikum Bremen-Mitte, the ASTA Bremerhaven, the Findus, the Stadttheater Bremerhaven and the Bremerhaven police are involved.

Even before the public screening, the film will be shown exclusively for students at the university on 11 October at 11:45 am.