about us

nifu.tv was founded by Alexander Herrmann and Andreas Kapsner. With backgrounds in storytelling (Herrmann) and academic research (Kapsner), nifu.tv`s core interest has always been the thorough investigation and entertaining dissemination of complex subject matters. Our first project was “Shogi”, a movie about the world of Japanese chess, admittedly quite an unlikely topic for a documentary aimed at a Western audience. However, extending the film with further content in different media, we managed to capture both the strategic thrill as well as the rich cultural backdrop of the game.
Delving deeper, we started to play more and more with new technologies and how to use them for research and audience engagement. The promises and challenges of this field squarely meet our interests: new media and digital technology have brought the potential to tell stories with a whole new magnitude of scope, explored from different angles and in variable depth. However, it is not easy to find and investigate topics that are broad and rich enough to merit being covered in such depth and scope.
As we are not only engaged in story telling, but also in academic research, for us a natural place to look for such topics is in the realm of science. Thus, our main aim has become to bring together media creators and academics, mainly from the humanities and the social sciences, in order to spark new ideas for both research and storytelling.
We believe that the most exciting outcomes will result from an encounter at a very early stage, the stage known to media creators as "world building".
We are convinced that collaboratively fleshing out a story world will open up completely new views and fields for thought experimentation. Merging the fictional approach of storytelling with the analytical thinking of science we hope to find unique ways to communicate challenging ideas and to tell exciting and interesting stories.
As stories also shape the way we think we are convinced that the time has come for new ways of dramaturgy and storytelling.