31 October 2022

Die Frau des Dichters: Helke Misselwitz presents her new documentary film at the Akademie der Künste

Saturday, 5 November 2022, Hanseatenweg

Helke Misselwitz presents her new documentary Die Frau des Dichters (The Poet’s Wife) at the Akademie der Künste. The film premieres on Saturday, 5 November 2022, with the director in attendance. The screening is followed by a discussion with Misselwitz. In August 2022, Die Frau des Dichters was awarded the prize for Best Socio-political Documentary at the Beyond Borders International Documentary Film Festival in Castellorizo in Greece. The film can be seen in cinemas across Germany from 3 November 2022.

Misselwitz’s film is a portrait of the artist Güler Yücel (1935–2020), offering insights into her life on the Turkish peninsula of Datça. Yücel talks about her art and remembers her husband, the poet Can Yücel (1926–1999), who was the victim of political persecution. In her colourful paintings, Yücel shows herself as a chronicler of an everyday reality shaped by the archaic nature of the landscape and rituals. Taking the paintings and conversations as her starting point, Misselwitz traces the mythological narratives of the region and presents other self-assured women who talk candidly about their lives.

Born in Zwickau in 1947, Helke Misselwitz lives in Berlin. She is one of the most important representatives of the last generation of film-makers from the DEFA studios in East Germany. From 1978 to 1982 she studied directing at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR, the state film school in Potsdam-Babelsberg. She was a master-class student of Heiner Carow at the Akademie der Künste der DDR and worked at the DEFA documentary film studio. She was one of the few East German artists to successfully continue her film work in the reunified Germany. From 1997 to 2014, she was a professor of film direction at the Film University in Potsdam-Babelsberg. Her breakthrough film Winter adé (1988) was a documentary about women in East Germany. Her feature films Herzsprung (1992) and Engelchen (Little Angel, 1996) were shown at international festivals and won multiple awards. In 2009 she received the Order of Merit of Berlin, and in 2016 she won the German Film Critics Association Award. Her work has also achieved widespread international recognition. Misselwitz has been a member of the Akademie der Künste since 1991 and has been Deputy Director of the Film and Media Arts Section since 2018.


Dates
Die Frau des Dichters
Film premiere and discussion
Film, D, 2022, 94 min., documentary film
Director/screenplay: Helke Misselwitz
DoP: Ferhat Yunus Topraklar, Yunus Roy Imer, Thomas Plenert
Followed by a discussion with Helke Misselwitz
Saturday, 5 November 2022, 7 pm
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
Tickets: 6/4 euro; Ticket reservations: 030 200 57-10 00; ticket@adk.de 
Online tickets: www.adk.de/tickets 

Press tickets: To reserve, please email presse@adk.de 
or telephone 030 200 57-15 14