2023-09-25 12:58:47
Sascha Schwingel is already familiar with decent happy endings for professional reasons: As a film producer, he prefers to focus on historical material with a lot of drama, but which often has a conciliatory ending. For example in “The Storm Surge”. Here a pregnant woman survives the Hamburg flood disaster of 1962 and ultimately names her child after her rescuer. A critic said at the time that the work was “love kitsch”. And now Schwingel, who was appointed new managing director of the Potsdam film company Ufa just a few days after his 52nd birthday, has another somewhat maudlin happy ending: “For me, returning to Ufa as CEO feels like like coming home,” said the Saarland native, who began his career at the Ufa subsidiary Teamworx (now Ufa Fiction).
Has been associated with the Bertelsmann Group for a long time
In fact, Schwingel has long been closely linked to the parent company Bertelsmann, to which Ufa belongs. After a few years at the ARD subsidiary Degeto, he most recently worked for the TV channels RTL and Vox and the streaming service RTL+, which are also part of Bertelsmann. His reputation within the company is correspondingly good; The current Ufa boss Nico Hofmann sees his successor not only as a “friend”, but also as a “smart manager”. Hofmann, one of the most successful German film producers, will remain part of the Ufa management as so-called chairman.
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According to the announcement, Schwingel, in turn, is now taking over “all activities that are bundled under the Ufa umbrella: Ufa Fiction, Ufa Serial Drama, Ufa Show & Factual and Ufa Documentary”. As he revealed to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), in addition to recent history, “it is primarily current social issues that move me.”
Schwingel is likely to be confronted with this not only in connection with the content of future Ufa productions, but also in the management of the company itself. New developments such as artificial intelligence pose challenges for the industry. “The market is under pressure,” Schwingel stated in the FAZ, but, how could it be otherwise, he predicted a happy ending in this case too: “In any case, I am convinced that the best is always ahead of us.”
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