A Russian teacher, reported by a student for criticizing the war in Ukraine, flees to Berlin. In a German school she stages her case, investigating political coercion, betrayal, and resistance. Active Vocabulary premiered at DOK Leipzig, winning Best Film in the German Documentary competition.

I’m glad to have contributed my camerawork to this exploratory, multilayered film.

A young stranger appears at a farm in southern Germany. Alex is looking for company and eager to find it in Adrian, a quiet boy that lives and works on the farm to overcome his drug addiction. At first, the companionship seems to be auspicious for the two outsiders until Alex starts testing his new position. The film was shot with amateur and professional actors in the setting of a therapeutic farm run by a family.

The film won the best german short film award 2023.

For my graduation at HFF Munich I created a feature-length documentary about four 10-year-old children living in Berlin. I worked as a one-person-team, observing and accompanying my protagonists for 9 months. Strolling through the city with them, we experienced their freedom as well as their first signs of rebellion. The film dips into the last days of childhood, into a “Paradise Lost” nobody can save or lose. The film premiered at Berlinale/ Generation in 2019 and toured at several other festivals afterwards.

Along with Simon Reichel, co-director and producer we created a short documentary about an initiative called Pop-Up Institut. On their pilot project the Pop-Up Institute brought together artists with and without schizophrenic experience to work together through the timespan of a year. The art created in collective meetings and through exchanging experience around schizophrenia was exhibited in June 2022 aiming to reduce stigma towards psychological diseases within our society.

‘Die Bairishe Geisha’ is a theatre collective consisting of Judith Huber and Eva Löbau. For the play celebrating their 20th anniversary I created four short films that were sent to the audience prior to the performances. In the play and films we dealt with their history as a collective and focused on the meanings of ghosts and fortunes within creative processes. The films also retell the story of the well-known Japanese Saga THE BALLAD OF THE NARAYAMA by Shichiso Fukazawa, which deals with the tradition of a mountain village where the elderly take on a burdensome one-way-journey up a mountain of the region – the Narayama.

CREATURE is a 30-minute dance film featuring performances of the Ben J. Riepe Company orchestrated in the Wuppertaler Schauspielhaus. The performers and their movements were set in correlation to the architecture of the house while remembering voices of Pina Bausch’s dancers set the theme for questions such as: How to deal with memories, legacy and decay during a pandemic where the future is not tangible and culture, movement and touch aren’t feasible? “Often we remember because we have lost something” says one of the dancers in the beginning. The film was realized for the Tanzfestival NRW in cooperation with the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

The director, Felicitas Sonvilla tries to save the damaged relationship with her younger brother Silvius. Together with their friend and camera person, Nina, they leave for a road trip through Europe, visiting the places of a fragmented childhood. During the shooting Silvius is in charge of composing the music for the film, but doesn’t interact with Felicitas the way she wants him to. Between car breakdowns, fights in parks and rare moments of intimacy, the film paints a portrait of two siblings, who don’t want to understand that they need each other.

During my studies 10 students were sent to Tunisia to explore journalistic fimmaking. I wanted to portray a family and reflect within that relationship the current political state as well as the traces of the revolution that had started in Tunisia only one year before in 2010/2011. I made a film that I still value a lot because for me it is an example of the serendipitous moments of documentary filmmaking in connection with an open gaze.