Germany is a large film market with an extensive subsidy system and a high production output. What stands out is that international success doesn't correspond particularly well to that. Individual exceptions tend to prove the rule.

It isn't a shortage of talent, and the explanation that German films are simply too ponderous doesn't get you very far. The reason lies quite substantially in how films get financed here.

How film funding works

A typical German cinema production is financed from several sources: federal funding, regional funding from individual states, broadcasters, sometimes a distributor, occasionally private investors.

Regional funding comes with a condition that turns out to be decisive: the so-called regional effect. A specified share of the money must be spent within the state that provided it.

The reasoning is economic. Public money from a region should generate value in that region.

The consequence for production is considerable. If a film receives money from three states, it must shoot in three states, regardless of whether that makes any dramatic sense. There are films whose locations quite visibly follow the funding map rather than the story.

The committee problem

The second structural difficulty concerns how decisions get made.

Funding decisions are taken by committees typically composed of representatives from various institutions. Those committees must reach agreement.

Consensus decisions have a known property: they favour projects nobody objects to over projects that excite some people and repel others.

Art frequently works the other way round. The films that travel internationally are often exactly the ones that polarise — with a distinctive authorial signature that some viewers find alienating.

A system that rewards the absence of objection therefore produces a great deal of solid middle ground and very few extremes in either direction.

The television factor

Public broadcasters are involved in a large share of German cinema production. This is historically grown and secures financing, but it has consequences.

A broadcaster co-financing a film is thinking about eventual transmission, and therefore about a broad, often older audience in a primetime slot. That shapes material selection, narrative approach and casting.

A lot of German cinema consequently looks like very well-made television. That isn't an insult — German television production is often technically excellent. But it's a different aesthetic from the one that generates attention at international festivals.

The language question, partly

Language gets cited as the primary reason and I only half believe it.

South Korean, Spanish and Danish productions have achieved enormous international reach without switching to English. Streaming has measurably increased willingness to read subtitles, particularly among younger audiences.

What is true: German carries less international cultural priming than French or Italian, where there's a long arthouse tradition to draw on.

What has worked

It's instructive to look at which German productions have travelled.

A striking share are historical subjects, particularly from the twentieth century. Germany has a history that's internationally known and that people are interested in, and that's an entry point that works.

Equally striking is that several of the most successful productions of recent years have been series rather than cinema films — financed by streaming services, which decide differently from funding committees and consider an international audience from the outset.

That's perhaps the most interesting observation of all: change the financing structure and the output changes.

What would need to change

One further factor deserves mention, because it operates quietly and shapes a great deal: the timing of when money is committed.

Funding decisions are typically made on the basis of a screenplay and a budget, well before shooting. That means the script has to be finished and defensible in a committee setting long before anyone has stood on a set. It rewards material that reads well on paper and explains itself clearly in a written application.

A great deal of what makes a film distinctive, though, emerges during production and editing — a performance that changes the balance of a story, a structure that only works once assembled. A financing model that locks everything down at the script stage leaves little room for that, and productions that deviate risk problems with their funders.

None of this is unique to Germany; most public funding systems face the same tension between accountability and creative flexibility. But it compounds the committee effect described above, and together the two go a long way towards explaining why the output is so consistently competent and so rarely surprising.

I'm sceptical of simple answers, but a few things have been discussed in the industry for years.

Automatic funding tied to measurable criteria rather than committee decisions — models along the lines of the tax incentive schemes several other countries use.

Less rigid regional-effect requirements, or at least the ability to bundle them so productions don't have to tour the republic.

And a discussion about whether the goal is cultural diversity or commercial success. At present the system attempts both simultaneously, which is why it achieves neither particularly well.

None of this is a criticism of the people who make German films. It's an observation about a system they have to work within — and one which most of them consider in need of reform.