Biography:

Annekatrin Hendel was born in East Berlin where she studied design, graduating in 1987. Since then, she has worked as a freelance costume and set designer, especially for theater 89 in Berlin.

Hendel, who is also a scriptwriter, debuted as film director with her 1999 short feature film Chiquita for Ever. In 2004, she founded her film production company IT WORKS! Medien, where she is its managing director, as well as the director and producer of feature and documentary films. The first film produced under the IT WORKS! label was Zur Zeit verstorben, by Thomas Wendrich, a short feature film that won numerous festival prizes and was nominated for the 2004 German Short Film Award.

Hendel has created several important German documentaries that have explored the lives of exceptional artists, current affairs topics and important social issues, often related to East German history. Vaterlandsverräter—a portrait of writer Paul Gratzik, who was a Stasi informant and whose tumultuous life ran to extremes—premiered at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival and won the 2013 Grimme Award. It was the first of Hendel’s Treason Trilogy and was followed, in 2014, by Anderson, a documentary about Sascha Anderson, a member of East Berlin’s oppositional literary circle who was later revealed to be a Stasi informant. The final film in the trilogy is Familie Brasch, a chronicle about the legendary family of GDR author and filmmaker Thomas Brasch.

Hendel’s film Schönheit & Vergänglichkeit, about three friends who were part of the East German punk scene in the 1980s, reflects on their youth and a country that does not exist anymore, as well as on the challenges of their current lives. It won the Heiner Carow Prize at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.

Annekatrin Hendel, often described by critics as a “documentarist of East Germany,” has won numerous other national and international awards for her films as well. She lives and works in Berlin.