After rising to fame thanks to his performances in films such as The Baader Meinhof Complex [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], Run Lola Run and Lammbock, German actor Moritz Bleibtreu is now ready to make his directorial debut, with Cortex [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film]. “As an actor, you often find yourself in the position of having to provide some kind of justification for content over which you do not, in fact, have control and that you are also actually not responsible for, because you neither wrote the script nor directed,” he said on set last Wednesday, the German Press Agency reports. 

Written, directed and produced by Bleibtreu, the psycho-thriller will tell the story of Hagen (Bleibtreu himself), a man in his 50s who is experiencing frequent nightmares and can no longer distinguish between dreams and reality. Time and again, he dreams that his wife Karoline (Nadja Uhl) is having an affair with a young outlaw named Niko (Jannis Niewöhner). Other parts are to be played by Marc Hosemann, Anna Bederke and Nicholas Ofczarek.

Filming, which started on 26 February and is planned to wrap on 18 April, is taking place in Hamburg and Berlin, with Thomas W Kiennast (3 Days in Quiberon [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Emily Atef
fiche film], The Dark Valley [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film]) on board as the film’s director of photography.

Cortex is being produced by Paloma Entertainment (Bleibtreu and Emek Kavukcuoglu) together with Port-au-Prince (Jan Krüger) and Warner Bros Entertainment Germany (Jacqueline Jagow). So far, the project has received €550,000 worth of production funding from the Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein (FFHSH) as well as €200,000 from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. Distributor Warner Bros Pictures Germany is planning a theatrical release for autumn 2020.