Back to top

All Directors

On this page you will find all directors who work with us. We see ourselves as a ‘director’s label’ and try to make the entire cinematic work of the directors accessible.

“What I’ve always wanted: that it continues, that the film triggers something and that people talk, (...) that the film continues in real life.”

Photo: Jenny Lou Ziegel (l.) and Irene von Alberti (r.) at the shooting of "The long Summer of Theory"

"I don't try to have a particular style which I impose on each project as a kind of ready-made concept. I experiment and try to develop a form based on the material. I'm not interested in representing a social milieu, but in describing the mental state it produces."

Photo: Reinhold Vorschneider (l.) and Thomas Arslan (r.) at the shooting of "Bright Nights"

"Matisse felt that the human side of painting is the result of a mysterious, expressive quality which, if the painter is possessed of a good sensibility, comes through in the final painting. Thus it need not be overly stated in the subject matter ... He was referring to paintings, but I apply it to cinema. It is about perception. I like films that have a deceptive lightness, with underlying layers of consciousness, images, sound. Film is like music. In a sense, I compose my films as musical scores."

Photo: Cynthia Beatt at the shooting of "The invisible Frame"

“To be able to think about space we have to represent space, and in film we do that by setting up a media space between image and brain. Two-dimensional pictures arranged in science-fiction-like time structures and soundscapes that represent or contain pieces of reality.”

Photo: Heinz Emigholz at the shooting of "The Last City"

“As a director you have the opportunity to stage a small world and also to bring it to a new start - to do and to re-do. These are important things for me. (...) A film never really ends. The ending is arbitrary, because the money runs out or for other reasons.”

Photo: Omer Fast at the shooting of "August"

“I don’t want to tell a story. No complete identification with the people on the screen. Recognition, yes. But one where I still know that it’s me who recognizes something, that it’s me whose curiosity is aroused about something with an uncertain outcome, about people and conditions, situations, episodes.“

Photo: Pia Frankenberg during the shooting of “Never sleep again”, © P.Groenewold

“The audience had no lobby in New German Cinema. I have always said that people paid and have a right to expect me to speak to them on film. That was interpreted to me at the time as corruption, but it means the exact opposite. (...) Film and audience = cinema.”

Photo: Roland Klick (l.), Robert van Ackeren and Marquard Bohm at the shooting of "Deadlock"

"I like to mix all genres, play with them, proceeding in a montage-like manner and using very contradicting devices. It is not streamlined and is therefore often labelled experimental film. I prefer transgressions, even within contrasting genres."

Photo: Monika Treut (l.) and Elfi Mikesch (r.)

„Research is an important process for us; this is how we find the questions our films revolve around.“

Photo: Philip Scheffner in "Der Tag des Spatzen" (Day of the Sparrow)

“David Lynch has said that he no longer makes movies because the market is dead. That’s true. Nevertheless we fight for every film (...). We often make small, radical films where we are used to fighting our way uphill all the time. One can only hope again and again that the films will retain a value, that the films will remain.”

Photo: Patti Smith (l.) and Frieder Schlaich (r.) at the shooting of "Three Stones for Jean Genet"

“Fassbinder said ‘I don’t throw bombs. I make films’, and I would have loved to tell him, ‘I make films, too’.”

Photo: Christoph Schlingensief at the shooting of "Terror 2000"

“Throughout my cinematographic work I seek to explore the elementary forces of love, death and life with the help of various phantasmagorias and utopian visions.”

Photo: Werner Schroeter at the shooting of "Palermo or Wolfsburg"

„My films are improvised, there is no script. I always use non-professional actors I know, more or less, so I intuit how they will react. I put them in situations where I ask them to say or do something so I can more or less predict how it will develop. There is a beautiful quote of Picasso’s: ‘I don’t look for things, I find them.“

Photo: Albert Serra (© Claudia Robert Malagelada)

"In my films I often place the set pieces from reality in an unusual spot in order to awaken an alertness in the viewer that invites them to question the connections from reality."

Photo: Isabelle Stever (l.) and Constantin Campean (r. DoP) at the shooting of "Grand Jeté" (© Anna Melikova)

"For me, political art (...) is only credible if it risks something. You have to go so deep into the wound that you come under suspicion."

Photo: Hans Jürgen Syberberg (l.) and Susan Sontag (r.)

"They say: if you don't show your feelings, you have everything under control. If you get upset, you are unprofessional. But that also prevents a lot. For me, however, emotions, discourse and intellectuality are not in contradiction to one another."

Photo: Tatjana Turanskyj