DQ hears from the creative teams behind two forthcoming German dramas: Westend Girl, which tells the real-life story of a young girl who discovers her parents are drug traffickers, and Die Düsteren (The Dark Ones), a supernatural mystery series set on a remote island.

One series is described as a grounded domestic drama, while the other is a mystery thriller with more than a touch of the supernatural – and both are coming to screens in Germany and beyond very soon.

Westend Girl tells the story of 19-year-old Ronja, who is forced to grow up overnight when her parents are arrested for drug trafficking. It comes from Flare Film in coproduction with broadcasters WDR and Arte, with Beta Film handling distribution.

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Westend Girl

A six-hour thriller based on real events, Westend Girl stars Helen Zengel as Ronja, who has just moved into her first apartment and is about to begin medical school. But the day after her 18th birthday party, everything changes when her seemingly perfect parents are arrested and accused of running the largest cocaine ring in the region. Ronja also comes to realise the police see her not just as a witness, but a potential accomplice.

Fifteen years in the making, the series comes from creator Pola Beck, who first learned of the true story when she was encouraged to dramatise it by the real Ronja.

“It started out with an email I wrote to my friends when I had a creative crisis,” Beck remembers. “After my debut film [2012’s Breaking Horizons], I was a bit like, ‘Well, what am I gonna do now? What do people want to see in cinemas?’ I wrote an email asking those questions to my friends, and then my friend from school wrote back and said, ‘Well, something happened in my family and maybe we should meet.’

“We hadn’t seen each other in a long time and then we met, and this was the starting point. It was very overwhelming for me because I knew the family, her friends and their home, and I knew the parents, and I was quite shocked. But then I thought, ‘Wow, what a diamond of story.’ In the beginning, it was maybe more of a therapy session. She said that a lot of times – ‘I felt like [I was] in a film.’”

Their original plan had been to dramatise the story as a movie, but after a producer pulled out of the project, Beck partnered with Flare Film’s Martin Heisler to turn it into a series. And despite the time it has taken to bring Westend Girl to the screen, the filmmaker never lost hope that it could be done.

“I really believed it’s in the story,” she says. “It’s both family drama and thriller, and it’s funny sometimes as well, because all the stories my friend told me were also kind of absurd. I thought, ‘Well, it’s worth telling the story,’ and I really think people should see it. I felt like I owed this to my friend – ‘I have to do this. I can’t tell her I failed.’”

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