^{Photo: Minke Faber}

The 65th Berlinale promises to be a busy edition for Vanessa Henneman, founder of leading Dutch talent management firm, Amsterdam-based Henneman Agency. Aside from feting her company’s 10th birthday in style during the festival, the talent agent will also make her first official outing as Benelux’s new representative on the board of the EFA, having been elected in late December to replace outgoing Luxembourg producer Jani Thiltges.

She’s also set to co-launch a pan- European initiative, the European Talent Network, in co-operation with German agency Spiel-Kind and Danish counterpart Team Players at Berlin. In addition, her company represents the Netherlands’ Shooting Star Abbey Hoes, star of Saskia Diesing’s Nena.

Quizzed on how she first got into the talent agent business, Henneman replies with a laugh: “It’s very simple. I fell in love with an actor.” The daughter of artists, Henneman reveals she had originally planned to go into law. “I’d watched my parents struggle and wanted nothing to do with the arts. After school I enrolled to study law. But there’s a saying in Dutch, ‘Blood creeps where it can’t go’. [But] I couldn’t see myself as a lawyer at 22, so I went to film school.”

Despite graduating with top honours from the London Film Institute, Henneman eventually decided directing was not for her. “I loved directing but the people I knew there who have since made it were so focused. I felt my strengths were elsewhere. I made the intuitive but rather unhip decision to go back to do a Masters in Entertainment Law,” she explains.

Henneman then started managing the contracts of her now husband, the popular actor Daniël Boissevain, who she met when he auditioned for a film she was directing. “Bit by bit other actors came to me asking if I could help them too and that’s how it all started,” says Henneman, who went on to work for Features Creative Management for eight years before founding Henneman Agency in 2005.

Today, her company represents more than one hundred top Dutch talents, ranging from actors and presenters through to directors – such as Mijke de Jong, Ben Sombogaart and newcomer Shariff Korver, whose debut feature The Intruder premiered at Toronto – as well as writers and composers.

In a strategic move, Henneman branched out into representing writers and directors a few years ago, as a way of getting involved in projects early on in their genesis. Her initial aim was to secure more work for the actors on the agency’s books but the move has resulted in the company increasingly packaging projects from scratch. Recent productions initiated at the agency include Anne de Clercq’s upcoming Jack Orders a Brother. De Clercq co-wrote the screenplay with another Henneman client, screenwriter Anne Barnhoorn.

Now, after a decade successfully focused on the Netherlands, Henneman is increasingly keen to work across Europe. Under the European Talent Network initiative due to be announced at Berlin, Hennemann Agency will combine forces with Spiel-Kind and Team Players to create a one-stop shop for producers who want to source European talent. “There’s increasing demand for European actors with the rise of series like Game of Thrones, Vikings and even Marco Polo set against non-US backdrops,” says Henneman.

She also wants to explore the European remake market, citing the 2007 Dutch film Love is All which was also adapted for German and Belgian cinema audiences. “I’m looking for projects which can be shot on relatively small budgets and then be remade,” says Henneman. “I know some people object to remakes but I see it as doing different versions of the same play.”