Julia von Heinz

One thing you can’t fault Julia von Heinz for... and that’s a dogged persistency to realize her dream of becoming a film director. Unlike some of her colleagues who had dabbled in filmmaking during their teenage years, Julia had her first brush with the audiovisual industry when she began a technical training program at public broadcaster WDR in Cologne at the age of 22.

"This was my first encounter with the medium of film and I initially worked with the idea of becoming a director of photography," she recalls. Another practical course of training followed at the Technische Fachhochschule (TFH) in Berlin where she graduated as a qualified DoP. "But my innermost desire was to direct," Julia says.

However, the film schools in Germany didn’t seem to recognize her potential talent at the time and turned down her applications no less than seven times. In fact, it looked as if Julia’s dream might never be realized until she met filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim who was teaching at the University of Film & Television in Babelsberg.

"I became his artistic assistant and he was a real mentor for me, opening up lots of possibilities and contacts," she explains. "He made it possible for me to make my first feature-length film 'Was am Ende zählt' ('Nothing Else Matters')” which premiered at the Berlinale in 2007 and won the German Film Awards’ Golden Lola in the category of Best Youth Film. The production stars Marie Luise Schramm and Paula Kalenberg as two young women with completely different concepts of life, who are thrown together by destiny.

Initially, Julia wanted to follow this debut with another fiction project, but was then given the opportunity to make the documentary "Standesgemäß" ("Noble Commitments") produced by Kings&Queens Filmproduktion, the production company she founded with her husband John Quester in 2007.

"Standesgemäß" portrays three aristocratic single women – Countess Alexandra von Bredow, Baroness Alexandra von Beaulieu-Marconnay and Verena von Zerboni di Sposetti – who are torn between traditional expectations and everyday life, between manor house and pre-fab, high-rise buildings. They are three outsiders in the bizarre and eccentric microcosm of German nobility.

"I enjoyed working on the documentary, but it does demand a lot time," Julia recalls. "That’s hard to combine all of this when, like me, you are a mother of three children. Making documentaries isn’t a hobby because you have to really reckon with spending a year of your life on a project. At the same time, the subject of "Standesgemäß" was very important to me because of my own background."

"Each of my films has posed a different kind of challenge, and this wasn’t any different with 'Hanni & Nanni 2'," she continues. "I had always wanted to have a chance to entertain children and this project gave me the opportunity to work in a different narrative form. The scale of the production – I had ten times the budget of 'Was am Ende zählt'! – meant that so much was possible and I could try out so many of my ideas."

"Hanni & Nanni 2", which is again inspired by the famous St. Clare’s children’s book series by Enid Blyton, was produced by UFA Cinema at locations in Bavaria last summer and will be released by Universal Pictures in Germany during 2012.

Ask Julia for the influences on her as a filmmaker and she replies that her role models are "those from American narrative cinema like Jason Reitman, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Sam Mendes, with their analytical view of people’s lives that is both humorous and warmhearted. That’s something one rarely sees in German cinema, but it is the kind of note I aim to strike in my own films.”

At the same time, she says that her sense of political commitment also forms the films she makes. "As a teenager, I was very involved in the 1990s in the anti-fascist (antifa) groups in the debates on social issues, neo-Fascism and anti-Semitism. My desire to become a filmmaker ultimately evolved from my political commitment and the question of how one can still achieve and change something."

Indeed, Julia’s next two planned film projects will return to these issues. "In 'Hannas Reise' ('Love Isreal'), we will speak about the German-Israeli relations by way of a light and humorous love story in the third generation and show how the Holocaust still continues to have an effect 70 years later."

Meanwhile, "Zwei Leben in Deutschland" about the German TV presenter Hans Rosenthal "will not only be the story of a hero and exceptional artist in German show business, but also say something about the strong anti-Semitism and the leaden silence in West Germany of the 1970s. These are subjects which also move me a lot because of my own Jewish roots."

Author: Martin Blaney