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Robert Bramkamp, born 1961, studied German philology and film studies in Munster. Since the mid-1980s, Bramkamp has made several unconventional films that blend documentary, essay, and feature film elements. Bramkamp also works as a lecturer for directing at Konrad Wolf film school. His first feature film, "Gelbe Sorte" (1987), tells the story of the fight of a young Westphalian farmer for his professional survival. Bramkamp cut this story of a slick subsidy fraud with images of the Chinese cultural revolution: "Nowadays, you have to withdraw trite failure from the grasp of concernment and to shift it geographically or historically until it becomes controversial again in a new set-up" (Bramkamp).
"Der Himmel der Helden" (1987) tells the story of the rescue of an US astronaut by a female Russian cosmonaut who takes him back from the moon while the real Apollo astronaut James Irving, a Christian fundamental, enters a stage in Bielefeld as a preacher. "Die Eroberung der Mitte" (1995) is a filmic dispute of the boom of self-help psychology.
The experimental film collage "Prüfstand 7" (2001) traces back the first "V2" rockets, the "miracle weapon" of the Nazis. Fictional parts of the film employ motives from Thomas Pynchon"s novel "Gravity"s Rainbow" – "Bramkamp"s film has a lot to offer: it is a stunning pool of images of the relation between high-tech and the Holocaust and between fear of dying, the desire for immortality, and longing for death. The film radically criticizes how history is presented in the cinema, on TV, and in the feuilleton but is also offers a profound conception of history itself." (Michael Girke).
Bramkamp"s film "Der Bootgott vom Seesportclub - Die 100 ME" (2005) tells the story of Enki (Steffen Scheumann), who got work through a job creation scheme and starts to discover godlike traits in himself, and was simultaneously set up as a network project on the internet, together with artist Susanne Weirich.
In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Bramkamp taught at the Pasadena Art Center in Los Angeles in 1996 and was a lecturer at the Academy for Film and Television "Konrad Wolf" in Potsdam-Babelsberg from 1998 to 2006. Since 2008, he has been Professor of Experimental Film at the Hamburg Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HfbK), where in 2013 he organized the film policy congress "Offensiv Experimentell".
In collaboration with the artist Susanne Weirich, with whom he has worked regularly since 1998, he co-directed the science fiction film "Art Girls" between 2010 and 2013. The film follows three Berlin artists who are the first to discover and experience the symptoms of a newly emerging "collective human intelligence". "Art Girls" screened at several international festivals and won the Jury Prize at the Chennai International Film Festival in India. The German theatrical release took place in April 2015. In addition, "Art Girls" became the basis for a 32-part video lecture series on "Making Innovative Films" for the online education platform Iversity. This series was further developed two years later for the Hamburg Open Online University. In this context, Bramkamp also created the film-political collective work "Dazu den Satan zwingen" (2015-2017) together with students of the HfbK.
As co-director again with Susanne Weirich, he began shooting the documentary "Die Ausstattung der Welt" ("Make Up the World") in 2020, which explores the everyday work in three very large but very different prop houses. The film premiered in the German Competition of the DOK Leipzig 2023 festival and was released in January 2024.
In addition to his teaching, Bramkamp is a member of the German Film Academy and serves on the board of the Federal Association of Municipal Film Work.