Bavaria Fiction’s documentary unit, founded in March 2022, has been spun off as a separate brand called Icon Docs. The unit produces both films and series for cinema, TV and streamers.
In addition to in-house and commissioned productions, national and international co-productions are set to be increasingly produced in the future. Icon Docs is headed by Emanuel Rotstein, who will continue to report to Marcus Ammon, managing director content at Bavaria Fiction.
Ammon said: “In recent years, the demand for factual programming has increased worldwide. We have therefore established Ion Docs as an independent label in the German and international market with our documentary team centered around the renowned leadership of Emanuel Rotstein.”
Rotstein said: “Icon Docs stands for state-of-the-art projects with a distinctive high production and news value. We want to move people, shake them up and build bridges between cultures. With a clear focus on current, political and investigative topics, biographies and contemporary history, we create sophisticated content that deserves the attention of a broad, global audience.”
Icon Docs’ current productions include the true-crime documentary “Car Park Murder – Who Killed Charlotte Böhringer?” for Sky and the biopic “Ultra-Orthodox: Rabbi Akiva’s Journey to Freedom” for ZDF and 3sat.
Projects in development include “Hitler in Hollywood” (working title), which examines the complex relationship between Hollywood and Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and “The Park – New York’s Revolutionary Heart” (working title), a documentary about Washington Square Park reflecting its history “as a place of change, resistance and the search for identity – as well as an arena in the fight for freedom and equality,” which takes on a particular poignancy in the light of the forthcoming U.S. presidential election, Bavaria Fiction said.
