STAY BACK PLEASE

2016 As a foreigner in Germany with little knowledge of the language, I never could understand the words repeated at all underground and overland train stations in Hamburg. What was I supposed to do: in or out? I was uncertain, and worried about obeying the words uttered by the dark voice of the conductor. Stay back …

Hans by Les Maries

DE 2020 https://vimeo.com/486966317 As a tribute to Jacques Brel, I co-wrote this song with Marie-Laure Timmich, for the Franco-German duo LES MARIES. It was meant to be a sad song. It’s the story of a passion. Then Les Maries asked me to do a video clip. I chose to do an animation based on the drawings …

L’Onde du Midi in the Louvre

2020 DE/FR  Director’s statement  I met Elias Crespin when I was making a documentary about his grandmother, the artist GEGO, for the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. In 2019, he asked me to make a short film for his major project in the Palais du Louvre: L’Onde du Midi.From the conversation we had with the artist in his …

Paula Modersohn-Becker, a Breath

DE 2007  “There is nothing new to tell about Paula Modersohn-Becker. But the way documentary filmmaker Nathalie David has arranged the long-known, often quoted material into a film about the becoming and growing of a painter is simply wonderful. David does not succumb to the fatal error of sentimentalising her life and reducing it to …

This Photographer called Leonore Mau

Diese Photographin heißt Leonore Mau DE 2005/2016 They met at the beginning of the 1960s. Hubert Fichte (1935–1986), the young and ambitious writer who made his homosexuality a matter of principle. And the architectural photographer Leonore Mau (1916–2013), who was tired of middle-class family life. An extraordinary love affair and productive artistic partnership developed, which …