Jünglinge Film Set for Next Feature as it Preps First English-Language Film, New Series Projects and ‘Lesbian-Demon-Horror’ Pic

After wowing audiences with their 2020 debut film, the award-winning Berlinale screener “No Hard Feelings,” and branching out into TV, Paulina Lorenz and Faraz Shariat of Berlin-based Jünglinge Film are set for their next big-screen project from an increasingly voluminous pipeline.

Lorenz and Shariat, who are celebrating their company’s 10th anniversary this year, are also developing their first English-language pic and working with some of Germany’s highest-profile producers on ambitious series.

Jünglinge is scheduled to begin production in May on “Prosecution” (“Staatsschutz”), a legal thriller that explores right-wing violence in the German justice system, which Shariat will direct.

Chen Emilie Yan, Alev Irmak, Sebastian Urzendowsky and Arnd Klawitter star in the film, which follows a young Korean-German public prosecutor (Yan) who’s starting her first job in a small eastern German town.

“It’s her story of resistance and trying to figure out whether you can resist within the system or if you need to be outside of it,” Lorenz said.

Lorenz and Shariat share a passion for telling stories from post-migrant, queer and feminist perspectives, something they see as especially important in today’s Germany.

Looking back at the last decade, Lorenz said the discourse “is only getting worse with blaming refugees, blaming migrants for problems, and forgetting the history of people with migration biographies who have been living in Germany for a long, long time, who rebuilt the country after World War II and have been such a big part of German culture and the economy, but have not been represented in this way in film and television.”

Lorenz and Shariat met as students at the University of Hildesheim, where they were doing cultural studies with a focus on film. They established Jünglinge in 2015, having never attended film school. “In hindsight, I’m glad that we didn’t go to film school and that we had to do it the hard way,” Shariat said, adding that the experience helped them grow together as a team.

They are now developing their first English-language feature film, an adaptation of “The Beach Boy,” the story by American writer Ottessa Moshfegh (“Eileen”), who is also penning the script. The tragicomedy follows a grieving widower who sets off on an epic quest to find the truth about a mysterious photo left behind by his deceased wife.

Also in the works is a supernatural thriller described as “a lesbian-demon-horror” pic based on an idea by Iranian-American writer Sepi Mashiahof that will likely be shot in Farsi.

“Āl” follows a young woman who is forced into a polygamous marriage in 1990s Tehran in order to produce a child. While at first resented by the older wife, the two women go from enemies to lovers as they unite to ward off a demon. (In Persian folklore, āls are demons of childbirth who attack mothers and newborns).

The themes and subject matter that characterize Jünglinge’s works were evident in “No Hard Feelings,” which won Berlin’s queer Teddy Award for its story of a young man of Iranian descent in Lower Saxony who falls in love with a refugee.

Lorenz and Shariat went on to work with X Filme on “Love by Proxy,” an episode of the RTL+ true crime series “Zeit Verbrechen,” about an aging German widower who falls for what he believes is a young, beautiful woman trying to secure a fortune in Ghana and who desperately needs his help. The episode, which featured Sandra Hüller in a key role, premiered last year in Berlin’s Panorama sidebar.

The duo also partnered with Studio Zentral to produce “Black Fruit” (“Schwarze Früchte”), an eight-part series for ARD from writer-actor Lamin Leroy Gibba that follows the lives of two Black and queer best friends in Hamburg. The series premiered last year in Tribeca ahead of its German TV debut.  

Currently, Jünglinge is collaborating with Komplizen Film on the series “Ministry of Dreams,” an adaptation of Hengameh Yaghoobifarah’s novel, which explores the impact of loss on three Irani women in Berlin and offers a queer take on unwanted motherhood.

Lorenz and Shariat are also working with director Aslı Özarslan (“Elbow”) on “One in a Million,” a multi-part family saga that chronicles the rise and fall of three generations of Turkish immigrants from the 1960s to the 1990s as they achieve great financial success in Germany.

Shariat stressed that “especially now, where politically there’s so much at stake and there’s a lot of stigmatization but also manipulation of narratives around migrants going on in the political arena, I feel that it becomes even more urgent to kind of oppose that in a way.”