Biography:

Annekatrin Hendel, born in East Berlin, is a successful German scriptwriter, dramaturg, director, and film producer who has dedicated herself primarily to documentary filmmaking. Before directing her own films, she had studied design from 1988 on and initially worked as a costume and set designer. In 2004, she founded her film production company IT WORKS! Medien, and she continues to work there as managing director, producing award-winning feature films and documentaries.

In 2011, Hendel directed her first documentary, Vaterlandsverräter (Traitor to the Fatherland). The film premiered at the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, and marked the start of the director’s Betrayal Trilogy. More awards followed, including the Peace Film Prize in 2011 and the Grimme Prize in 2013. In 2011, her documentary Flake-Mein Leben (My Life: Flake), the story of Rammstein keyboardist Christian “Flake” Lorenz, was released. This documentary was also nominated for the Grimme Prize. Anderson, the second part of the Betrayal Trilogy, premiered at the Berlinale in 2014.The film’s story focuses on the eponymous writer Sascha Anderson who was part of  East Berlin’s oppositional underground literary and art scene, yet also worked as an informant for the Stasi. Hendel’s next film project, released in 2015, was Fassbinder, a cinematic portrait about the legendary filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Two years later, she documented four weeks that she had spent with her old friend, a former artist, now homeless. The result, Fünf Sterne (Five Stars), was awarded the Heiner Carow Prize at the Berlinale. Hendel completed her Betrayal Trilogy with the 2018 documentary Familie Brasch (The Brasch Family), about one of the most sensational German families. In 2019, she filmed Schönheit & Vergänglichkeit (Beauty & Decay), a cinematic portrait of Sven Marquardt, an (East) Berlin-based photographer and bouncer, which was also awarded the Heiner Carow Prize at the Berlinale and screened at numerous international festivals.

For her work as a producer of the film Space Dogs, Annekatrin Hendel was nominated for the 2021 German Film Award and the 2022 Austrian Film Award. With Union-Die besten aller Tage (1. FC Union Berlin: The Best of All Days), Hendel returns to her native Berlin and focuses on the East Berlin football underdog club 1. FC Union Berlin. 

Hendel  has served as a jury member in multiple state film funding institutions, including the Federal Government Commissioners for Culture and Media (BKM), the Hamburg Film Fund. She has also served on film award and various festival committees: e.g. Berlinale, First Steps Award, Filmfest Schwerin, Achtung Berlin-Festival and many more. Annekatrin Hendel also served on the German Film Academy Board of Trustees from 2018 to 2023 .

Annekatrin Hendel, mother of two, was a resident artist at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2016 and a Max-Kade-Foundation writer-in-residence at the Deutsches Haus in New York in 2025.