Berlinale Shorts with Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck.

[February 11, 2022] Greetings from Berlin. In this episode, we are joined by Anna Henckel Donnersmarck, the curator and head of Berlinale Shorts. 

Berlinale Shorts is the section dedicated to daring works of the short form. This year’s lineup does not disappoint, with a selection of 30 international and world premieres from new and established filmmakers like  Radu Jude, Atsushi Wada, Sky Hopinka, and many more, as well as new filmmakers with equally strong and aesthetically interesting perspectives. 

Earlier this week, I sat down with the curator and head of the section, Anna Henckel Donnersmarck, to get a glimpse into all the gems to be discovered and a little insight into how the program came together. 

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Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck, Berlinale Shorts

Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck is the curator and head of Berlinale Shorts, the competition for short films at the Berlinale.

She works with the moving image in various ways. For 20 years, she has been active as a programmer (Filmwinter Stuttgart, Kasseler Dokfest, ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, etc), moderator (Pictoplasma, Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film, etc), jury member (Szpilman Award, REGARD Quebec, Tel Aviv Int. Student Film Festival, Filmfest Dresden, Tehran Int. Short Film Festival, etc) and panel participant (Fajr Film Festival Tehran, Curtas Vila do Conde, etc). From 2007 to 2019, she served as a member of the selection committee for Berlinale Shorts.

Her primary focus is on the short film format.

In addition, she has conceived and realised video installations for exhibitions, stage works and concerts, for example for Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hygiene Museum Dresden, GRIMMWELT Kassel, Humboldt Lab, Bauhaus Archive Berlin, Constanza Macras/DorkyPark, Mathilde Monnier, Schauspiel Köln, The Wooster Group NYC, the Berlin Philharmoniker and opera houses in Berlin, Frankfurt and Zürich.

She teaches film theory and video practice at various art schools.

Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck was born in Frankfurt/Main in 1973 and grew up in Indonesia, Japan, England and Bavaria. She studied at Camberwell College of Art and Design in London and received her degree from Film Academy Baden-Württemberg/Ludwigsburg, focussing on animation and documentary filmmaking.