Biography
Heike Fink was born in 1968 in Marbach am Neckar, Germany, into a family of chefs, winemakers and butchers. Partly because of this family background, after graduating from high school she completed an editorial internship at a gastronomic magazine, where she also worked as a restaurant tester. In 1990, she began studying literature and sociology in Wuppertal.
Fink came to screenwriting by chance in 2000, when Don Schubert, then an aspiring screenwriter, presented his ideas to her in preparation for future pitches. Fink didn't find his stories convincing, so she wrote a treatment of her own, which the two of them developed into a screenplay: "Die Frau, die Freundin und der Vergewaltiger" was produced by RTL in 2001. This set the course for Heike Fink's future career: in 2001/02 she completed her studies at the Hamburg School of Writing, and in 2004/05 she was a scholarship holder at the Drehbuchwerkstatt in Munich. In 2007, she received the Münster.Land Screenwriting Award for the project "Emma's Käsebrot" (with Ruth Olshan), followed by a nomination for the German Screenwriting Award in 2009; however, it would be many years before the project was made into a film. Instead, Fink's young adult novel "Die Sache mit der Liebe und den Flügeln," based on the screenplay, was published in 2015.
Heike Fink completed a non-fiction master class at the International Film School Cologne. She then made her directorial debut with a documentary: "Eisheimat" ("Home in the Ice", 2012), about women who emigrated to Iceland as agricultural workers after the Second World War, premiered at the Nordic Film Days Lübeck in November 2012 and was released in cinemas a year later. For Bernd Schaarmann, she wrote the concept for his last documentary, "Nice Places to Die" (2014), in which he explores the rites and traditions of dealing with the deceased on three continents; for this project, the two received a Gerd Ruge Fellowship. Fink's non-fiction book "Mein Jahr mit dem Tod" (2018) was later the result of her intensive exploration of the topic of death.
A major success was the television film "Aufbruch in die Freiheit" (2018, directed by Isabel Kleefeld), written by Heike Fink, Ruth Olshan and Andrea Stoll, about a woman who joins the protests against Paragraph 218 of the German criminal code, which made abortions illegal, in 1971. In addition to very positive reviews, the film received several awards, including the German Television Award. Fink also wrote scripts for four episodes of the award-winning KIKA docu-fiction series "Triff..." on Alexander the Great, Beethoven, Marie Curie and Harriet Tubman (2017-2019). She has also taught at the University of Wuppertal, the Filmacting School Cologne and the University of Applied Sciences for Media in Bielefeld.
As director and co-writer, Fink produced the documentary "Die Kirchenrebellinnen - Maria 2.0 kämpft" (2020), about the controversy surrounding the position of women in the Catholic Church and possible approaches to reform. Also in 2020, the screenplay "Emma's Käsebrot" finally was made into a film under the new title "Himbeeren mit Senf" ("Raspberries with Mustard"; directed by Ruth Olshan); the world premiere took place in October 2021 at the Amsterdam Cinekid Festival. The German theatrical release was in April 2023. In the same month Heike Fink's first feature film "Olaf Jagger", which she also penned, was released. The comedy with the popular comedian Olaf Schubert was already the winner of the New German Cinema Award at the Hofer Filmtage 2022.
Besides her practical film work, Heike Fink teaches screenwriting and dramaturgy at the Filmschule Hamburg and the Internationale Filmschule Köln.