Introduce Yourself : European vs US production by Thomas Hasler

I have an agreement in principle with a producer in Prague to make a Czech-German-Austrian-US co-production of a story about my father, Karel Hasler's, defiance of the Nazis through songs. I was introduced to Sirena Film by the Czech Film Commission. They've been educating me about European film production which is largely based on subsidies, as opposed to the US system which is based on investment. The story is based on my mother's memoirs. My father was a well-known song writer, singer, actor a director who is today known mainly for sentimental songs of Old Prague. But he also had a political side, and that's what led to his demise - he was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and died at the Mauthausen concentration camp a month after I was born, so I never met him. He met my mother when he was celebrating his 60th birthday at a nightclub in Prague - she was a German, half his age, and under the Occupation Czechs snd Germans were not allowed to fraternize...About 10 years ago we made a documentary about The Immortal Balladeer of Prague at the suggestion of the late Arnost Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and the author of many books about the Holocaust, who considered my father a symbol of the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.