German film producer Optik Oldschool has been revealed as the new owner of InovisCoat and FilmoTec.
InovisCoat is the coating facility which coats many films for third parties, including Lomography. FilmoTec is the film-producing company that was spun out of the former East German film brand ORWO.
The two companies had recently been under the ownership of British businessman Jake Seal, with FilmoTec’s films being sold under the label “Original Wolfen“.
Optik Oldschool said in a blog post on Wednesday (22 July): “We are incredibly proud to announce that Optik Oldschool’s co-founder Chris Vandebroek has acquired InovisCoat (Monheim) and FilmoTec/Original Wolfen (Wolfen, Bitterfeld).
“With this acquisition, we are no longer just developing and distributing photographic film. The Optik Oldschool family has become a film manufacturer.
“This is about far more than business.
“It is about preserving one of Europe’s most important centres of photographic film production and ensuring that film Made in Germany continues to have a future. At a time when manufacturing is increasingly being moved abroad, we have chosen the opposite path: to protect knowledge, safeguard jobs and preserve decades of expertise.”
Optik Oldschool initially started as a film lab in Dusseldorf in Germany in 2024, and started film production the following, when it launched the colour film Opticolour 200. This was widely believed to be the same film as the Original Wolfen NC200 which had been unveiled at The Photography Show in London in March 2025, but which was never commercially launched.
The film was initially launched in 35mm and 120 formats, but has also been released as a 4×5 film.
Since the launch of Opticolour 200, Optik Oldschool also took over the Santa Film brand which had been owned by Camera Rescue in Finland, and has restarted production of its Santa Color 100 and Santa Color 800 films.
As recently as last week, it also unveiled a new black-and-white film under the Optik Oldschool brand, called OptiMono 100.
Optik Oldschool said negotiations to take over the business, both part of Seal’s portfolio, started last year. “During the summer of 2025, discussions about the acquisition began and were successfully concluded in July 2026.”
The news comes after months of speculation over Seal’s continued ownership of the Original Wolfen brand, which had been dogged by problems with fulfilling customer orders.
German film photography magazine Silvergrain Classics published a story on Wednesday about the new change of ownership, saying: “With the acquisition of InovisCoat, Optik Oldschool gains control of one of the very few companies in the world capable of developing modern photographic emulsions and coating them in multiple layers. The addition of Filmotec brings decades of expertise in the manufacture of photographic and motion-picture films.”
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
