Written by Rowena Carr-Allison on Mar 2, 2010. Posted in On Location

Frankfurt as a location for filming

Best known as a banking hub, home to the world’s largest book trade fair, Goethe and, of course, sausages, Frankfurt is actually full of surprises.

Frankfurters have seen their city nicknamed ‘Mainhattan’ thanks to their futuristic skyscrapers designed by the likes of Ghery and Foster. Its skyline, which includes some of Europe’s tallest buildings, sits pretty beyond the Main’s peaceful riverbanks where cyclists, joggers and skaters vie for space with market stalls and tourists en route to the city’s fine museums.

Wander the streets and you’ll find everything from large Wilheminian-style houses to grand villas, cutting-edge designer museums, Bauhaus architecture and historical gems like the Cathedral, the timber-framed Römer city-hall and the glamorous old Opera. Frankfurt’s past sometimes gives its present a fairytale feel, but a few streets away the infamous red light district is another story altogether.

There’s no doubt that locations are varied and plentiful, from the exotic Palm Garden’s greenhouse to the Sachsenhausen lanes where age old pubs offer up local cider.

The financial district is used to the limelight, starring in commercials for DHL, feature films like Vulkan and standing in for New York in Iron Sky. The tallest building in town, the Commerzbank’s (pictured), stands 300 metres high and is also very film friendly. It recently hosted Unter dir die Stadt produced by Bettina Brokemper (Antichrist, Milk, Dogville).

Regularly seen on TV screens, the area around the station has been hosting TV cop shows for years, like ZDF primetime’s Ein Fall fuer Zwei and Die Kommissarin.

A big attraction to the region is the funding from organisations like Hessen Invest Film and Hessen Film Fund. Investing up to EUR7.1 million every year, the region employs 90,000 people in the industry, with a staggering annual turnover of EUR2.8 billion. Post production and commercials account for most of this, but feature films are on the up says Kathrin Ahrens of Film Commission Hessen.

She admits it’s often necessary to import crews from Berlin or abroad (which is easily done thanks to the great local infrastructure and airport), but the technical equipment and the suppliers are there. Smiling, she says: “We have no studios but we have been known to sometimes use ex-US Army hangers to build sets in!”

With a tagline of ‘everything under one roof’ Hessen has a practical online database including everything from secluded river valleys to medieval castles, historical spa resorts, romantic palaces, the Rheingau’s vineyards, 50’s architecture, university halls, futuristic skyscrapers and unique sites like Kloster Eberbach, a monastery last seen in the Name of the Rose.