Films by Cassis Birgit Staudt

Germany 2023, 42 min
by Ira Tondowski

When doctors discover that Leonard has brittle bone disease, they give him a life expectancy of one year. Today, Leonard is in his mid-20s, a screenwriter, director and actor. He gets around in a wheelchair, he is small, his body is different, he lives independently and self-determined, and he says: "I don't hate my body. I find my body annoying sometimes, yes, and I have goals that sometimes go beyond that, but these are still achievable."

Germany 2013, 93 min
by Sandra Kaudelka

In I WILL NOT LOSE director Sandra Kaudelka, having been a talented athlete herself in her youth, portrays four former top athletes of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), who used to go to their mental and physical limits for their carrers – and even beyond. Sandra Kaudelka made her very own experiences with the sports system of the GDR, in which she was trained in her childhood. Still coping with these experiences today, she examines how her own life would have been, if the Fall of the Wall hadn’t liberated her from the daily drill and pressure to succeed. So she visits four former top athletes - four people with four totally different biographies: Brita Baldus, Ines Geipel, Marita Koch and Udo Beyer. Through the clash of these different pathes of life, I WILL NOT LOSE enables an extraordinary and personal insight into the former system of the GDR and the German German history.For after the Fall of the Wall, each of the four protagonists dealt in their very own way with both the end of their carrers and the transition from socialism into western capitalism.