Welcome Goodbye - Dokumentarfilm

In no other city is tourism approached from such a xenophobe position as in Berlin. News of people gathering in a public meeting by the name of „Help, the Tourists are Coming!“ in February 2011, at which, among others, some very anti-visitor opinions were vocalized – sped around the world. Media from New York to London, Paris to Munich was all over it, calling it „reputation damage“. The city is bankrupt; according to the senate, tourists are the answer to filling the empty purse. Overnight accomodations need to increase from a present 20 million a year to 30 million by the year 2020. Left-wing extremists have openly called out for tourist-bashing as simultaneously „Berlin Does Not Love You“ stickers have appeared everywhere in the district of Kreuzberg. The hateful new name „permanent tourist“ began to circulate,another of those terms designed to define who belongs and who doesn’t. Is the famous alternative area of Kreuzberg, 90% of whose residents have moved here from elsewhere, now a hotspot of xenophobia?

Are residents’ fears justified? Are ever increasing hoards of tourists, especially the allegedly noise and filth-producing ‚easyjetsetters’ from more expensive european countries, destroying the unique atmosphere of this district and the cherished „free space“ both literally and figuratively speaking, of Berlin? Are tourists the cause of gentrification? Are there alternatives—a softer form of tourism perhaps?-- for the Berlin biotope?

These are the questions our project intends to pursue, without a pre-conceived point of view.

Our target audience are all „berliners“, native berliners, neo-berliners, and all those considering becoming berliners. Naturally also tourists. In fact, everyone who loves or hates Berlin and deals with this city as living space in one way or another--we have a huge potential audience... Our aim is to produce a feature length documentary on this subject to run in Berlin cinemas and send to festivals worldwide.

It is our goal to make a film which gives a channel for the varying voices being raised in favour and against the ever increasing number of tourists in Berlin. WELCOME GOODBYE would like to shed light on this subject and allow the audience to form ist own opinions. Of course we would also like to instigate discussions and dialogue here as an astounding number of people—many themselves not born in Berlin—are expressing having a self-understood „something against tourists“. [ We would like to lure this pessimistic attitude out of its dark corner and have a better look at what lies behind it. ] Aside from this, the film also intends to entertain, to show the tourists and the various forms of tourism that go on in this city. Berlin itself is the secret main actor; underlying our personal motivation in making this documentary is our long standing love for this multi-facetted and ever-changing city in which we live.

My previous documentary, BERLIN: HASENHEIDE, was produced entirely independently of government sponsorship or television funding, leaving me the reigns in terms of freedom of content. The positive viewer and media feedback was overwhelming and motivated me to endeavor another documentary in which I don’t need to make concessions. This does not mean that I won’t try get government or private funding on board. But your support by becoming fans on this site or the facebook website, or by watching my trailer or by becoming sponsors, will already demonstrate that WELCOME GOODBYE is not just my personal cause, it is the cause of many. I thank you all in anticipation for your interest in the project and for reading thus far.

The money collected here, if no other sponsorship works out, would enable us to make this film as a low budget version. The low-budget version is only possible if all the collaborators on the team work for free. In the case of “over financing”, it would not in fact be over financing as the budget we have calculated for the making of this documentary is twice as high as the amount we are aiming to collect here.
The making of a movie is an incredible financial endeavor. There is a huge amount of obvious and hidden costs. We are lucky that (most of) the crew is working for free at this point, and we are also able to avoid certain costs due to very generous equipment loans, but this does not cover all our costs. Even if we are fortunate enough to receive additional government subsidies or grants, we will still have to invest a considerable amount of our own capital into the project.
Every Euro collected through Startnext flows directly into covering the following costs:
Technical equipment
Film permits
Licenses (ex. Dolby)
Catering/
Meals for the crew
Cutting room for audio and visual
Equipment and media rooms for exposure correction and colour correction
Dubbing
Post dubbing
English subtitles
Audio mixing
DVD mastering
Broadcast Master Tape
Film-out
Etc …