Retrospective Jeanine Meerapfel

As a continuation of the film series accompanying the exhibition “OUT OF AND IN FOCUS: A Jewish Film History of West Germany” on show until January 14, 2024 at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, the DFF cinema presents a retrospective in September and October in honor of Jeanine Meerapfel’s 80th birthday. On September 28, she will be in person at the DFF.

The director and screenwriter grew up in Argentina as the daughter of German-Jewish emigrants. She came to Germany in 1964 and studied at the Institut für Filmgestaltung at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm under the tutelage of Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz. After graduating, she and other Ulm students founded the Frankfurt film collective Eppelwoi Motion Pictures, which produced films such as “AM AMA AMAZONAS” and “ZWICKEL AUF BYZICKEL” (both 1969). She later moved to Berlin, where she directed her first feature film “MALOU” in 1981. Shortly thereafter she made the autobiographical documentary “IM LAND MEINER ELTERN”. In her films, Jeanine Meerapfel explores her own history, Jewish themes (“DER DEUTSCHE FREUND”, “ANNAS SOMMER”), migration history (“DIE KÜMMELTÜRKIN GEHT”) and draws on her experiences on two continents. She dedicated three films to the victims of the Argentine dictatorship. In 1990, she became a professor for film and television at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and since 2015, Jeanine Meerapfel has been president of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.