International film finance architecture
Holding, project entities, reporting and international access for independent cinema.
01 — What we do
AUF-WASSEN builds the structure a film sits inside: how the production is organised, how it is accounted for, and how it reports to the people who need to see it clearly.
Independent films are usually structured once, under deadline, by people whose real job is making the film. The paperwork is improvised, the reporting is assembled after the fact, and every new project starts from a blank page again. That is not a small inconvenience. It is the reason serious counterparties hesitate, and it is the reason the same avoidable problems recur from film to film.
We treat structure as part of the craft. Each production is set up as its own contained entity, with books that can be read by a professional without translation, and on infrastructure that the next production inherits instead of rebuilding.
02 — How we work
Each film is its own entity, with its own books, its own obligations and its own perimeter. One production's difficulties stay inside that production. Nothing is commingled, and nothing quietly depends on a neighbouring project going well.
Statements are produced to a standard a lawyer, an accountant or a counterparty can read without a call to explain them. Records are kept contemporaneously rather than reconstructed, because a document written at the time is worth more than one written afterwards.
The templates, workflows and systems built for one production are kept and improved for the next. The work compounds. A company that makes several films should get better at making them, not merely more practised at improvising.
03 — Built here
ARIA is the production platform we built for our own films and then opened to other filmmakers. It reads a screenplay and returns the producer's pass: breakdown, schedule, Day Out of Days, budget, a map of where the financing could come from, and a distribution path. It is in public beta and free to use.
Open ARIA ARIA by AUF-WASSEN
04 — Contact
For production, structuring or partnership enquiries, write to us. We read everything that arrives.
AUFWASSEN · New York