Biography:

Winfried Junge was born in Berlin in 1935. He enrolled in the German Literatur program at Berlin’s Humboldt University in 1953, then transferred to the newly-founded German Film Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg (now the Academy for Film and Television) a year later to study dramaturgy.

After graduating in 1958, he began his work as a dramaturg at the DEFA Studio for Popular Science Films, and later worked primarily as an assistant director to Karl Gass. Both directors joined the DEFA Studio for Documentary Films in 1961. Junge has made some fifty documentaries for both cinemas and television, including productions filmed in Syria, Somalia, Libya, Great Britain and the Ukraine. His oeuvre also includes one feature film for children, Der tapfere Schulschwänzer.

But Junge’s most important work was a long-term documentary project called the Kinder von Golzow. Based on an idea by Karl Gass, the films in the series cover almost five decades of the lives of people born in the little town of Golzow; the first film, Wenn ich erst zur Schule geh’, was Junge's first solo film and shows the participants in the longitudinal study starting school, just a few days after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.

This series—on which Junge collaborated with his wife, Barbara Junge (script, editing, co-director)—encompasses twenty films made between 1961 and 2007. Worldwide, the Children of Golzow project is only rivaled in length by the British UP series (1964-2012, directed by Paul Almond, Michael Apted); together, these are the longest-running chronicles in the history of international documentary.