Biography
Petra Biondina Volpe was born in Suhr, Switzerland in 1970. From 1992 until 1994, she studied art in Zurich; in 1995, she started working as a film editior for two years. In 1997, she enrolled at the film school "Konrad Wolf" in Babelsberg. Her short "Crevetten" won the Action Light Award at the Locarno Film Festival and was named Best Student Film at the Molodist IFF. Her follow-up "Schlorkbabies an der Raststätte" (2002), won a fellowship award at the Deutsche Kamerapreis.
Since her graduation in 2003, Volpe has been working as a writer and director. She made her feature-length debut with the TV production "Schönes Wochenende" (CH 2006), which she followed with the TV comedies "Kleine Fische" (CH 2007) and "Frühling im Herbst" (CH 2009), the latter garnering her several awards. In addition to her directorial work, Volpe also wrote the screenplay to Bettina Oberli's "Lovely Louise" (CH/DE2013).
"Traumland" (CH/DE 2013) marked Petra Volpe's first theatrical release as a director. Intertwining the stories of four utterly different characters and their respective problems, the film won numerous accolades, and received several nominations at the Swiss Film Awards, with lead Ursina Lardi eventually taking home the award for Best Actress.
Volpe's adaptation of the children's book classic "Heidi" (2015) was also a great success: the German-Swiss production attracted more than 1.2 million viewers in Germany alone and was awarded the Bavarian Film Prize and the German Film Prize for the best children's film.
With "Die göttliche Ordnung" ("The Divine Order", 2017), about the Swiss women's movement of the 1970s, Volpe made the most successful Swiss feature film of 2017. She received the award for best screenplay at the Swiss Film Awards and the Nora Ephron Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. As a screenwriter, she wrote the post-war mini-series "Frieden" (CH/FR/DE 2020) and the tragicomic marriage story "Die goldenen Jahre" ("Golden Years", CH/DE 2022).
At the end of 2023, Petra Volpe started shooting her next feature film: "Heldin" portrays a hospital nurse who tries to keep her empathy and idealism despite all the stress.