Films by Jenny Lou Ziegel

Germany 2018, 17 min
by Alex Gerbaulet

Two newspaper articles, ten years apart, two different women, the same wording. In 2001 the “Göttinger Zeitung” wrote that Margit (69) had lived a secluded life as an inconspicuous woman. In 2011 the “Hamburger Abendblatt” stated that Irina (65) had lived in seclusion, a non-descript woman. Up to the moment of their appearance in these newspaper lines, both women were invisible, forcefully concealed by their roles as wives and homemakers. Only for a brief moment did they claim visibility. Through acts of violence.The short film The Sleeper reconstructs and imagines the stories of these two women who were extrinsically determined throughout their lives, struggling to express themselves in vain until the only way for them to end the spiral of every-day violence was to resort to violence themselves. The cinematic narrative, too, oscillates between documentation and fiction. Everyday scenes, translated into animated still lives in the film, suggest that something is about to happen or just took place. The character of the homemaker seems omnipresent though she never appears on the scene, just as the actual protagonists Margit and Irina remain invisible.

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.