Karin Jurschick

Director

Karin Jurschick, born on October 17, 1959, in Essen, is a renowned German documentary filmmaker, author, cinematographer, and professor of documentary film at the HFF Munich. After studying theater, film, and television studies as well as German language and literature and history at the University of Cologne, she was culture editor at Stadtrevue Köln from 1990 to 1994 and then worked as a freelance radio and television writer for WDR. In 1984, she was one of the founders of the International Women's Film Festival “Feminale” in Cologne, which she helped organize for over 14 years. She has been making independent documentary films since 2000. Her debut, DANACH HÄTTE ES SCHÖN SEIN MÜSSEN (2000), examines her mother's suicide and received numerous awards, including the FIPRESCI Award at the Berlinale and the Best First Documentary Award at the Hot Docs Festival in Toronto. This was followed by socially critical works such as DIE HELFER UND DIE FRAUEN (2003), which won the Arte Documentary Film Prize and the Adolf Grimme Prize in 2004. Her film “Die Wolke – Tschernobyl und die Folgen” (2011) was again nominated for the Grimme Prize. Documentaries such as “Nach dem Mord an Theo van Gogh” (2005) and “Nicht mehr” (2006) have also been presented at numerous festivals. Her most recent cinema projects include “Der Weiße Raum” (2015), a visual essay documentary that received an honorable mention at the Visions du Réel Festival, and “Krieg & Spiele” (2016), an examination of drone warfare that premiered at the Emden Film Festival. In addition to her film career, she is a university professor and has been teaching at the HFF Munich since 2017.