Titel Kino 1/2002 - German Cinema

Hermine Huntgeburth (photo © Stefan Falke)
Director’s Portrait Hermine Huntgeburth
Hermine Huntgeburth was born in the very Catholic city of Paderborn in 1957.
After initial experience in the wardrobe department of the Paderborn Theater, she
enrolled in a course studying Film at the Hamburg College of Arts in 1977. In 1983,
with a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in hand, she
moved to study Film in Sydney. During her studies, Huntgeburth worked as a
scriptwriter, camera woman, technician and assistant director at the theater in
Esslingen (Germany), and made her main mark in documentary film. In 1992, her
feature film debut Im Kreise der Lieben received the German Film Award in Gold
for the Best New Director, the Promotional Prize of North Rhine-Westphalia, and an
award from the Confédération International des Cinémas D’Art et d’Essai. Since 1987, she
has been part of Josefine-Film, together with director and scriptwriter Volker
Einrauch and scriptwriter Lothar Kurzawa – ”a production company consisting of three
creative people“ – and she has been making a name for herself as a first-class TVmovie
director. Her unmistakable works, whose stylistic certainty enables them to
maintain a balance between the everyday and the grotesque, have been presented with
many of the most important German television awards. She realized her first majorcompany
cinema project in 1997 with Das Trio. Her film Bibi Blocksberg will be
coming to the cinemas in 2002, and an international co-production thriller – with the
working title Weiss – is currently in development.
In this sense, her films are studies of milieu,
Heimatfilme if you like. They have nothing in common
with folklore, but relate universal longings
which one may also encounter in the German
provinces – feelings which certainly warrant the
wide-screen format. In 1997, therefore, Huntgeburth
realized her first big-budget cinema film
Das Trio; a socially aware pickpocket drama
about love and disappointment. The production
cost 5 million marks and was distributed by the US
major Warner Bros. Of course she values the
advantages of a generous budget, in particular the
time it makes available for filming. But only the
artistic idea makes money into a good film:
”Individual directors like Steven Soderbergh or
Lars von Trier show the importance of creativity",
she says, "their films are the ones that remain in
our memories, no matter how successful
Hollywood’s blockbusters might be."
She is now making her first children's film for the
cinema, Bibi Blocksberg (cf. p. 28), with a
budget of eleven million marks. The next plan is
for a thriller, to be made in English and outside of
Germany for the first time. This is new ground, so
to speak, and if one looks at Hermine
Huntgeburth’s filmography, it seems that she
has actually entered new ground with every film:
”I would like to surprise people again and again, I
am bored by routine,“ she says. Then she explains
once again how important the casting is for a film.
Afterwards, she repeats three times: ”That’s the
way it is“, and then she is silent.
Hermine Huntgeburth spoke to Christa Thelen,
editor for the Financial Times Deutschland
16 Kino 1/2002