Helga Reidemeister

Helga Reidemeister, whose work includes over twenty titles and left a lasting mark on German documentary cinema, was born in 1940 in Halle. She studied painting at the West Berlin School of Art from 1960 to 1965. She worked as an art restorer for two years before taking on a position as a social worker for six years in Berlin. It was thanks to the women she encountered in Berlin’s housing districts that her desire to make her very first films emerged. In 1973, she began studying cinema at the DFFB - the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. ‘Von wegen 'Schicksal’(Is This Fate) (1979), her end of study production, was acclaimed for its cunning and fertile composition and received the Grand Prix at Cinéma du Réel, Paris in 1980, which she will also obtain with "Gotteszell" in 2001. Helga Reidemeister taught documentary cinema for several years in Ludwigsbourg and Cologne. Her later projects, still centred on women’s issues, led her in particular to Afghanistan.