Biography
Monika Hielscher, born on 5th of June 1952 in Wackernheim, studied Art and Visual Communication in Mainz from 1969 through 1973. After graduating, she studied art education, sociology, pedagogy, philosophy and politics in Frankfurt am Main. After three years of working as a teacher at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, the Volkshochschule Frankfurt and the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg, she co-founded the production company Rhizomfilm with Matthias Heeder. First, she worked as a producer, but from 1981 on co-wrote and co-directed reportages and documentary films with Heeder, among them "Tell a Vision - Privatfernsehen in Italien" (1982), which premiered at the International Film Festival in Mannheim. In addition, she did freelance work for a variety of TV programmes as well as for cultural policy associations. Monika Hielscher and Matthias Heeder went on to create a number of reportages and documentaries for public broadcasting, such as "Ludwigshafen – eine Stadt und ihr Projekt" (1983) about the introduction of private TV in Germany, "Wenn alle gehen, dann geh' ich auch" (1990) about Transylvanian Saxons and "Der Mann aus dem Westen" (1992) about a German dropout in Romania.
Often their films deal with xenophobic violence, the life of the Romanis and the oppression they face. In "Gelem Gelem" (1992) they accompany a group of homeless Roma who are trying to break the vicious circle of criminalization, deportation, illegal re-immigration and repeated deportation. In "Jorge - Tod eines Vertragsarbeiters" (1994), they reconstruct the events surrounding the death of an African man who was attacked by skinheads in Dresden in 1991. "Romathan - Ein Platz für Menschen" ("Romathan - Home for the Roma", 1999) tells the story of the first professional Roma theatre in Slovakia. "Verschleppt und weggeworfen - ein Sklave in West Afrika" ("Disposable People", 2002-2005) also belongs to the group of Hielscher's and Heeder's feature-length documentaries that were shown at international film festivals.
In 2017, their investigative documentary "Pre-Crime" premiered at the film festival Hot Docs in Toronto. The film deals with new, software-based methods of crime prevention that seem futuristic but already have become a reality. After screenings at a number of other festivals, "Pre-Crime" was released in German cinemas in October 2017.