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Jutta Brückner was born in Düsseldorf on June 25, 1941. After graduating from high school, she studied political science, history and philosophy in Berlin, Paris and Munich, earning her doctorate in 1973. She became involved in the women's movement and worked as an author from 1972. She had never attended a film school and once called her path to directing a "biographical coincidence" through which she met filmmakers such as Norbert Kückelmann. "I started making films as a self-taught filmmaker after I had given up writing," Brückner said in 1995, "No matter what I wrote, it was never what I wanted to write. It wasn't a question of good or bad, true or false, but rather that I never reached the core of my desire to write, the center from which legitimacy must come."
She wrote a script that she sent to all the German television stations - and which was eventually produced by the ZDF editorial team "Das kleine Fernsehspiel." In "Tue Recht und scheue niemand," Brückner reconstructed her mother's life. "The result," says film historian Thomas Elsaesser, "was a film that fused the autobiographical impulse, so strategically important for the women's movement, with a formal structure that was as innovative as it was ingeniously simple."
Before concentrating entirely on her own works, Brückner was still involved as a co-writer in Volker Schlöndorff's "Der Fangschuß" ("Coup de Grâce", 1976) and Ula Stöckl's TV movie "Eine Frau mit Verantwortung" ("A Woman with Responsibilities", 1978).
Brückner's second directorial work, "Ein ganz und gar verwahrlostes Mädchen - Ein Tag im Leben der Rita Rischak" (1977), was, like her debut work, based on an authentic life story: the title character (a friend of Brückner's) played herself. In the autobiographically tinged "Hungerjahre" (1980, TV), Brückner told of a girl's painful coming of age in the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) era of Germany of the 1950s. "Hungerjahre" was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlinale and won the German Film Critics' Prize the following year. With "Luftwurzeln" (1983), about a woman whose fear of breast cancer causes her to rethink her life, and "Kolossale Liebe" (1984), about the writer Rahel Varnhagen, she made two more highly acclaimed television dramas.
In 1984, Jutta Brückner became a professor of film and video work at the Berlin University of the Arts (HdK; since 2001: Universität der Künste, UdK). After the feature film "Ein Blick und die Liebe bricht aus" ("One Glance and Love Breaks Out", 1986), for which she was again awarded the Prize of the German Film Critics, she retired from the active film business for several years. Together with Wolfgang Ramsbott, she founded the Filminstitut HdK and, with Heinz Emigholz, established the Experimental Media Design course. Until 1998 she held a chair in the newly founded course of studies 'Experimental Media Design', followed by a chair for Narrative Film.
In 1992 she made the TV movie "Lieben sie Brecht?", a biopic of the actress and writer Margarete Steffin. In 1998, her docudrama "Bertolt Brecht - Liebe, Revolution und andere gefährliche Sachen" (DE/FL/SE/DK) premiered. In 2004 Brückner realized the feature film "Hitlerkantante" ("The Hitler Cantata"), about a young woman (Lena Lauzemis) passionately worshipping Hitler in the Third Reich. The film was shown at various festivals around the world.
Brückner's tenure at the UdK ended in 2006, and from 2003 to 2009 she was Deputy Director in the Film and Media Arts Department at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, of which she became Director in 2009. Since 2015 she has again been Deputy Director.