Tamora Imperatrix

Our movie "Tamora" is inspired by the look of "Game of Thrones" - that means, our look is pretty much the opposite of "Game of Thrones". When I had finished the script, I imagined shooting parts of the film in a historic setting, in ancient Rome. Because I love historic movies - mysterious corridors with flickering candlelight, throne rooms with gold and glitter and rotting iron dungeons where the blood is dripping from the walls, surrounded by cobwebs. Here, of course, as a low-budget variant.

So we were looking for a well preserved, very old basement vault (or something similar) as a location to shoot our film. But during pre-production, I watched another episode of "Game of Thrones" - and suddenly I realized that no matter what we would strive for - with our mini-budget we would not get anything that looks even close to real historical, it would all just look cheap and fake. And that does not work - my heart beats for "Game of Thrones" and gorgeous images on screen - and I also wanted gorgeous images for our little short film. But how to achieve that? Together with my co-producers - cameraman Michael Clemens and production designer Frank-Tilmann Otto - I considered what we could do to create unusual and inspiring images that we could actually afford.

At the same time, we were scouting locations. We did not find a cellar vault, but a studio with completely white walls - and here it came, the inspiration: we decided to use what we had - we would shoot the film completely in a white room. In a white world without borders - a world between reality and fantasy, between life and death. And since this would be a world that we created completely from the scratch, this world would become completely our own, with our rules, without comparisons. That's how it happened. A second shooting block took place in a completely black room, also this our own magical intermediate world.

My wonderful crew used all their imagination and creativity, to conjure mesmerizing sets into the white and black rooms - inventing costumes, incorporating props that I barely dared to dream about - from the glittering forest built from scratch to the exuberant party table, the dark execution place (with real fire indoors) to the foggy witch's kitchen - I was so happy to get all that (and so glad that we did not try to make a real bad copy of "Game of Thrones").

In a world that does not exist, everything is possible - our imagination had no limits. Kitsch and glitter, eroticism and murder, revenge and despair, blood and violence - everything was allowed into this story, held together by the Shakespeare plot. For me, the film is a violent trip into a very colorful, erotic and deadly nightmare world, which is beautifully supported by the old, magnificent Shakespeare language.

As a female filmmaker, it was also very important to me to repeal the submissive role of the original Shakespeare women who are tossed around by their kings and husbands - or reproved for taking matters into their own hands - and to create heroines who are not victims, but players - with all the good and bad that comes from it.

But in the end, of course, there might be no awakening from the world of nightmares, no return from the world of the dead when the boundaries between reality and imagination begin to disappear. Because, after all, I love horror movies and with Shakespeare´s help, we created a quite unusual one.