Biography:

Rolf Losansky was born in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, on February 18, 1931. After a book printing apprenticeship and studying medicine for a few semesters, he decided to become a film director. From 1955 to 1960, he studied directing at the Deutsche Hochschule für Filmkunst in Potsdam-Babelsberg. After graduation, Losansky made his debut film Mein Bruder Jacques (1962), a comedy with Johannes Hesters in the leading part and a West German/Swiss/Austrian television co-production. He also worked as assistant director to the prominent DEFA filmmakers Frank Beyer (Königskinder) and Günter Reisch (Ach, du fröhliche…) at the East German DEFA Studios.

Losansky’s first full-length children’s feature film was Geheimnis der 17 (1963), about a group of young amateur historians who decide to “capture” a Hussite castle in order to secure their place in the town’s historic festival. After his next film, the poetic crime thriller Die Suche nach dem wunderbunten Vögelchen (1963), based on the eponymous children's book by Franz Fühmann, Losansky was permanently hired as a director at the DEFA Studio for Feature Films. In the following years, he worked as a scriptwriter and director of shorts and films for an adult audience.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Losansky mainly focused on directing films for children and young people and became one of DEFA’s most successful and beloved children’s film directors. His films Das Schulgespenst (1986), Moritz in der Litfaßsäule (1983), Ein Schneemann für Afrika (1977) and Der lange Ritt zur Schule (1982) were screened at prestigious international film festivals and won numerous awards. His stories that offer a combination of real and animated characters—a talking cat, a lively snowman or cheeky ghost—were big hits with children and transformed their everyday lives into a magical world.

In 1974, Losansky premiered …verdammt, ich bin erwachsen, a story about a 15-year-old boy who experiences first love as well as the destruction of nature in his home village. More than ten years later, in 1989, Losanksy revisited these topics in his film Abschiedsdisco, a coming-of-age story that also critically addresses the destruction of the environment caused by opencast lignite mining in Lusatian villages. Both impressive and critical films are part of the group of DEFA’s films that created awareness of environmental pollution officially a taboo topic in East Germany.

Losansky who continued making films after the fall of the Berlin Wall, directing at theaters and teaching scriptwriting, died in Potsdam on September 15, 2016.

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