Biography
Hauke Wendler was born In Bremen in 1967. While studying political science and history in Hamburg and London, he already began working freelance for several TV stations and published books on media politics and migrations.
From 1995 until 2006, he was an author, director and reporter for political news programs "Panorama" and "extra 3". He also worked in the documentary and news department of the NDR network.
In 2006, Hauke Wendler and Carsten Rau founded their production company Pier 53 Filmproduktion in Hamburg. Together, the filmmakers created numerous award-winning TV documentaries and features, focusing on stories on migration and the refugee situation.
Their first theatrical release was the 2011 documentary "Wadim", which chronicled the tragic fate of a boy from Latvia who came to Germany as a child, and was deported at the age of 18. Ultimately, he took his own life after a desperate odyssey through Europe. "Wadim" was nominated for the German Documentary Award, and it won the Katholische Medienpreis and the Otto-Brenner-Preis "Spezial". Wendler and Rau tackled the topic again in "Tod nach Abschiebung" (2013), which won the 2014 DRK Medienpreis. In 2013, they founded Pier 53 media, which is based in Lower-Saxony.
Their second theatrical release "Willkommen auf Deutsch" premiered at the 2014 DOK-Fest Leipzig. The film explores the consequences that the sheltering of traumatized refugees in rural German towns has on all involved parties. At the Preis der deutschen Filmkritik, "Willkommen auf Deutsch" was nominated in the category Best Screenplay.
The following TV feature "Protokoll einer Abschiebung" (2016) won a "Sehstern" for Best Documentary and also received a Grimme-Award.
Wendler and Rau produced Pia Lenz' feature documentary "Alles gut", for which the director accompanied two refugee children during their first year in Germany and which premiered at the 2016 Nordische Filmtage Lübeck.
At the same festival, Wendler and Rau also presented their new documentary "Deportation Class", for which they used and expanded upon material from "Protokoll einer Abschiebung". Following several actual cases, the film harrowingly depicts the deportation procedure in Germany. "Deportation Class" won the documentary award at the 2017 Filmfest Schleswig-Holstein and was released theatrically in June 2017.
The documentary film "Atomkraft Forever" ("Nuclear Forever", 2020), directed by Carsten Rau and produced by Wendler, also received very good reviews, taking stock of the state of nuclear power in Germany and Europe. In parallel, Wendler had already been working on his own next documentary since 2016: in "Monobloc" he explores the history and perceived omnipresence of the plastic chair called Monobloc, a model used in a wide variety of settings around the world. After its premiere at Munich's DOK.fest@home 2021, the film was released in German cinemas in January 2022.