Die Möwe was a Chekhov adaptation created with Austrian director Gilbert Beronneau and an actors' collective in Berlin and Eisenhüttenstadt. The plan centered on filming in a former Stasi bungalow resort; Daniel arrived with a Mac laptop and Final Cut Pro and stayed to edit.
The beginning of a Berlin editing practice
What started as a temporary project became six months of couch-surfing, editing, and collaborative filmmaking. The production placed Daniel inside a European independent-film context where the editor was close to the material, the filmmakers, and the practical conditions of getting the film made.
A collaboration that continued
The work with Beronneau led directly to Lunik, a larger feature project about utopian squatters in Eisenhüttenstadt. Together, the two films mark the early phase of what became Tiptoe Films: a Berlin-based practice joining creative editing, production knowledge, and a willingness to work with unusual material.
The tools and scale changed over the following decades, but the underlying method remained recognizable—stay close to performance, understand the production around the footage, and let structure emerge through sustained attention.