Films by Ulrike Haage

Germany 2022, 8 min
by Christian Bau

During an art auction, at which Gerhard Richter's "Abstraktes Bild (H.M.)" is being offered for sale, a photo of a dead man appears on the livestream. A paranormal phenomenon?

Germany 2022, 88 min
by Pamela Meyer-Arndt

REBEL BEINGS unveils the fight for survival of three female artists behind the iron curtain of the GDR. As young women in Cold War era East Germany, Cornelia Schleime, Gabriele Stötzer and Tina Bara were repressed and persecuted by the socialist system and the Stasi for their art and political protest. At the lowest point, they only had cameras and their bodies left in order to express themselves. This film intimately explores their fearless struggle for existence, creative freedom and exceptional artistic works. Almost four decades later the GDR ceases to exist, but its traumatic impact on the artists lives remains.

Germany 2018, 135 min
by Volker Koepp

With SEESTÜCK, Volker Koepp concludes a series of documentaries that he began in 2010 with BERLIN-STETTIN. In this film, the director mixed autobiographical references with his description of East German film and living spaces for the first time. IN SARMATIA, 2013 he expanded the view of the region east of the Weichsel (Vistula) and between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. With LANDSTÜCK, 2016, Volker Koepp returned to the Uckermark in the north of Berlin. SEESTÜCK - a film about the Baltic Sea, about life by the sea and with the sea - concludes the series. As in the films before, the arcs of history are reflected here in the private lives of the present. The following also applies to the small Baltic Sea: landscape is world view.

2016, 122 min
by Volker Koepp

Idyllic landscape shots and conversations with local inhabitants convey the different facets of theUckermark in eastern Germany: a unique natural habitat, an embodiment of demographic change,a battle zone where agribusiness and organic farming duke it out. The end moraines of the Uckermark have kept Volker Koepp busy for decades. Following the socio-historical Uckermark, he devotes himself in Landstück even more intensively to conveying the sensory experience of this sparsely populated, ecologically fascinating region between Berlin and the Baltic Sea. The swamp waters rippling in the wind and the swaying treetops and grain fields are like an incitement to focus the gaze on the essence of this swathe of land. When locals and visitors alike rave about the alfalfa fields that prevent desertification but are threatened by conventional farming, when they identify wild herbs at risk of extinction in a small field, taste wild lamb’s lettuce, lentil vetch and field violets, the film becomes a hymn to those resisting the industrialisation of agriculture and the destruction of this cultural landscape. Whether the region’s 10 percent organic farmers, local beekeepers or the new inhabitants of a 50-year-old prefab who look out of their windows mesmerised – it’s a respect for nature that unites these otherwise so different neighbours whom Koepp portrays in his film.(Berlinale FORUM, Christoph Terhechte)

Germany 2012, 90 min
by div

GOLDRUSH tells the story of the Treuhandanstalt - the most expensive experiment and the greatest white-collar-crime since Worldwar II. It’s a film about greed as the driving force of economic development. The trust agency 'Treuhand' was established to privatise the state owned enterprises of the GDR. Never before had there been an enterprise like the Treuhand that temporarily ran and speedily privatised 8,500 companies. With four million jobs at stake in East Germany, this was a novel and unique experiment and one under enormous pressure of time. It was doomed to fail. Over three million jobs were lost and 4.000 companies were closed. The Treuhand existed for 30 months. In this time it lost 250 million Marks a day - in the name of the Federal Republic. Furthermore, the Treuhand was defrauded out of at least 20 billion Marks. The scandal has never been entirely resolved and most of the perpetrators escaped prosecution or were never impeached. GOLDRUSH is not a historical piece - it is a film about the limitations of the social consensus. The film does not accuse, does not judge. It simply insists on the need to ask questions, even if the answers are not always conclusive.

Germany 2010, 58 min
by Christian Bau

This poetic documentary film links the fate of the New York artist Jimmy Ernst and his parents Max Ernst and Louise Straus on several narrative levels with the story of the print shop Augustin in Glueckstadt. 1935 - Jimmy's parents had to flee to Paris - the Augustin family take in the 15 year-old as an apprentice typesetter. He learns how to set foreign languages such as Chinese or Arabic as well as Runic characters and cuneiform script. Inspired by his work he develops a fascination for symbols, that will influence his entire oeuvre. With the help of the Augustin family Jimmy finally manages to escape to New York in 1938. His father later follows him to the United States, his mother is deported to Auschwitz where she is murdered. The print shop Augustin today: based on photographs and contemporary witness accounts the abandoned print shop comes back to life. While the camera sweeps over characters, mysterious symbols and foreign alphabets, the images are accompanied by text passages from Jimmy Ernst's memoirs "A Not-So-Still Life", read by Burghart Klaussner to the music of the sound artist Ulrike Haage, In its entirety this provides a fascinating insight which is crowned by pictures taken by the renowned photographer Candida Hoefer.