David Wnendt

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David Wnendt at the 2012 Studio Hamburg Young Talent Award ceremony

David Falko Wnendt (* 1977 in Gelsenkirchen ) is a German film director and screenwriter . He gained fame through his multiple award-winning feature film Warrior (2011) and the bestseller adaptation Wetlands , which reached 1 million viewers in cinemas.

Life

David Wnendt is one of five children of diplomat Werner Wnendt ; his mother Eleonore is a doctor of geology.

Wnendt grew up in Islamabad , Miami , Brussels , Prague and Meckenheim in the Rhineland . He spent most of his school days near Bonn . After graduating from high school, he moved to Berlin in 1997 . Various activities followed, including as a lighting technician, director and production assistant or editor in film, television and theater productions. He did an internship at a theater in Paris . Until 2004, Wnendt studied business administration and journalism at the Free University of Berlin . After making his first short film at the age of 18, he also studied for a year at the famous FAMU film school in Prague .

After completing his master's degree, Wnendt was accepted at the "Konrad Wolf" University of Film and Television in Potsdam . There he trained as a film and television director until 2011. During his studies in 2005 he directed the 17-minute short film California Dreams about a young outsider who skipped school on his 14th birthday to visit the eponymous hairdresser in a Berlin-Marzahn prefabricated housing estate. The work brought Wnendt a first prize at the Berlin International Short Film Festival in 2006 . This was followed in 2007 by the 60-minute feature film Kleine Lichter , which was broadcast in 2008 by the Franco-German TV station ARTE . In the drama, Rosalie Thomass plays the role of a babysitter who is taken in by an older, overweight unemployed person ( Marc Zwinz ) after the accidental death of her paraplegic protégé .

Wnendt was successful with his graduation film at the film school, Kriegerin (2011). The drama is about a right-wing radical girl from East Germany (played by Alina Levshin ) who turns into a courageous, sensitive humanist through the acquaintance of a girl from a middle-class family ( Jella Haase ) and a young refugee from Afghanistan ( Sayed Ahmad Wasil Mrowat ). According to his own statements, the trigger for the script was a photo project by Wnendt, which took him to Lusatia and Saxony-Anhalt in 1998/99 and brought him into contact with young people there: [...] “The life of these young people was starkly different from me it was used. Many were openly right-wing, but integrated into public life in a completely normal way, ” said Wnendt, who spent a year and a half researching his film. He was advised by the sociologist Michaela Köttig, who had written a dissertation ( Life stories of right-wing extremist girls and young women , 2004) on the subject. Wnendt took part in right-wing demos and visited appropriate youth clubs in Brandenburg . He came into contact with right-wing extremist women via relevant dating platforms and recorded some of the interviews with them.

The world premiere of Kriegerin at the end of 2011 coincided with the announcement of the right-wing extremist terrorist organization National Socialist Underground (“Zwickau Terror Cell”), which is held responsible for a series of murders of small businesses with a migration background . The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung stated that in view of the current discussion on right-wing extremism, low-budget production would open the doors to cinemas and media that, despite their brilliance, might have remained closed to it under other circumstances. Despite the criticized psychologization of the main character at the end of the film, the film-dienst Kriegerin praised it as an exciting and intensely narrated, well-researched debut film, “which, apart from clichés, paints an authentic picture of the brown milieu in East Germany” and “boldly looks at the inner view of its characters “ Let in. In 2012, Kriegerin was awarded the German Bronze Film Prize and the Actor Prize to Alina Levshin, while Wnendt received the German Film Prize for best screenwriter, the Bavarian Film Prize for best young director and the First Steps Award .

At the beginning of May 2012, casting began for Wnendt's second feature film, the adaptation of Charlotte Roche's bestseller Wetlands . The film opened in German cinemas on August 22, 2013, after its world premiere on August 11, 2013 in the competition at the Locarno Film Festival. The film was a great artistic and commercial success, with 1 million viewers seeing it in German cinemas.

Then Wnendt worked on his third feature film, the Hitler satire He is back , a film adaptation of Timur Vermes' debut novel of the same name . The film was released on October 8, 2015. Wnendt then turned to the film adaptation of Wolfgang Herrndorf's bestseller Tschick , but was replaced as director by Fatih Akin in July 2015 .

David Wnendt is married and lives in Berlin.

Filmography (selection)

Direction and script
cut
  • 2010: Tehran Kitchen (short documentary)

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Iserlohner Kreisanzeiger and newspaper ; Iron wedding. Jubilee wedding with guests from all over the world in Gelsenkirchen , March 13, 2016
  2. ↑ a b Interview at planet-interview.de, January 24, 2012 (accessed April 27, 2012).
  3. ↑ Martin Schwickert: Film "Kriegerin": "Nobody wants to be the new Hoyerswerda". In: zeit.de . January 18, 2012, accessed December 20, 2014 .
  4. ↑ cf. Description ( memento of March 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) at kurzfilm.de (accessed on April 28, 2012).
  5. ↑ Profile  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at villa-aurora.org (accessed April 28, 2012).@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.villa-aurora.org  
  6. ↑ cf. Description ( memento of March 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) at art.tv, September 23, 2008 (accessed April 27, 2012).
  7. ↑ Director Wnendt: "Xenophobia is mainstream". In: fr-online.de . January 19, 2012, accessed December 20, 2014 .
  8. ^ Right- wing violence in the East: Germania Dating. In: tagesspiegel.de. Retrieved December 20, 2014 .
  9. ↑ Lühmann, Hannah: A laugh or a painful shame . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 21, 2012, No. 18, p. 34.
  10. ↑ Suchsland, Rüdiger: Kriegerin . In: film-dienst 2/2012 (accessed via Munzinger ).
  11. ↑ Lola 2012: Cancer Drama Wins. In: sueddeutsche.de . April 27, 2012, accessed December 20, 2014 .
  12. ↑ Tutmann, Linda: "... and then it worked" . In: Die Zeit, No. 6, January 31, 2013.
  13. ↑ Peter Kümmel: "He's back": Was he ever gone? In: zeit.de . October 5, 2015, accessed October 7, 2015 .
  14. ↑ Ways out of anger. In: tagesspiegel.de. January 19, 2012, accessed February 5, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Wnendt, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wnendt, David Falko (full name); Wnendt, David F.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German film director and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH 1977
PLACE OF BIRTH Gelsenkirchen , Germany