Films by Katharina Pethke

Germany 2024, 111 min
by Katharina Pethke

The ensemble of buildings that makes up the maternity clinic and art school in Hamburg where the director taught is the starting point for this sober interrogation of how motherhood and career can be combined based on three generations of German women.How much does a place reveal about its history? How much can forbears and their descendants know about one another? And how much continuity is contained within progress? When Katharina Pethke became a professor at Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts, it set in motion a process of reflection and research. Before, she had studied there, and so too had her mother and grandmother. Each of the women believed they were breaking new ground and yet, consciously or unconsciously, through stance or in protest, continued to carry on a legacy. This essay film examines the three generations caught between social determination and artistic ambition, self-will and motherhood, production and reproduction. The university building and its sole sculpture by a woman artist purchased by urban planner Fritz Schumacher, “Frauenschicksal” (Women’s Fate), become a mirror as well as showcase for enduring ambivalences. A virtuosic and astute work from an established filmmaker, Reproduktion explores questions of feminine and artistic identity through the lens of Pethke’s personal experience, interweaving her family biography with the architectural history of the art and media campus. [74 BERLINALE – Forum]

Germany 2022, 45 min
by Katharina Pethke

Lale is 26 and has been working as a model for years.But working on the superficiality is increasingly exhausting her. She finally wants to turn her attention to the important things in life - by having her physical body scanned and transformed into a virtual avatar. In the course of this moral and legal precedent, and facing her very real SELF, Lale has concerns. The film poses thequestion of identity in the age of self-dramatization andcertificates of authenticity.

Germany 2021, 65 min
by Katharina Pethke

Due to an actor, the life of the documentary filmmaker is thrown into existential turmoil: While for him everything in life is a game, she still firmly believes in reality.When she begins to document their joint encounter, however, the initial fascination is already over: between closeness and distance, the two protagonists sometimes repel, sometimes attract each other.Their triangular relationship with the camera and the sound device resembles a power struggle in the joint struggle for interpretive sovereignty: She wants him to show himself. He takes off his clothes.The naked genius with his self-exhibition pose finally appears to her as the man who is everyone: if he can be everyone, he is at the same time no one. Thus the filmmaker only supposedly fails in her attempt to look behind the mask - because the coat is empty.Fiction appears to her as a last resort.With the passage of time, the director sorts out her different approaches and in the process - partly ironically, partly accusingly - comes to terms with herself. In the process, she relates herself in the montage to other films that deal with the relationship between the showing and the shown: Another distancing strategy?"The magnificent black and white images guide the eye from the surfaces to the details, whose meaning the director probes and questions in her subjective, tentative voiceover. The film preserves the rawness of unfinished reflections without getting mired in vagueness. Step by step, the honest assessment of a desire is achieved; a desire which could function only in the delicate balance between attraction and repulsion and from which Katharina Pethke frees herself by adopting a position of artistic distance. Her sometimes self-mocking commentary is supported by dramatic guitar riffs (provided by Hochmair’s band project “Die Elektrohand Gottes”) and underpinned by filmic references, all of which revolve around the making of images and the relationship between reality and imagination." [Luc-Carolin Ziemann, 64 DOK Leipzig]

Germany 2019, 30 min
by Katharina Pethke

Elsa is 20 and graduated from high school last summer. She spends her days sleeping. Reading. Thinking. Everyone else has made up their minds: Voluntary social year, world trip, studies. Elsa simply can't do it.Anything but being confronted with thefact that the future is a wide field - undescribed and directionless. Between "luxury" and a real problem, her attitude to her own situation changes. Completely free and unbound, easy and carefree and infinitely burdened by the serious decision: Who do I want to be? Who will I be? A film about this moment of not-yet-being and the pressure to make a decision.

Germany 2009, 64 min
by Katharina Pethke

Ever frequently, irritations, anxiety disorders, burn-out, depressions, and other psychological illnesses have become a reason for employees to obtain a sick certificate. How are 24/7 availability, multitasking, or the abolition of regular working hours linked to this phenomenon? In her graduation film for Cologne Academy of Media Arts, Katharina Pethke portrays the blurring of boundaries at work and the insecurities provoked by this. BURNING WITHIN shows people looking for help: seminars and coaching sessions where the coaches guide people towards self-guidance.