Biography
Philip Widmann was born in West Berlin in 1980. He studied cultural anthropology, ethnology and American studies in Hamburg, before attending documentary film classes at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. His student film "Destination Finale" (2008) combined found footage from the 1964/65 Eurotrip of a Vietnamese man with images and sounds from the US invasion of Vietnam in early 1965. "Destination Finale" won Best Documentary at the Tampere International Short Film Festival.
Since 2009, Philip Widmann has been a member of the film collective LaborBerlin. His documentary short "Die Frau des Fotografen" (2011, co-directed by Karsten Krause) a student film about a forty-year marriage documented in countless photos taken by the husband garnered several prizes: a First Steps Award, the Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis and the Special Jury Award at the Curta Cinema Festival in Rio de Janeiro, among others.
Widmann made his full-length film debut with the essayistic documentary "Szenario" ("Scenario", 2014) about the contents of a briefcase from late 1970 which he uses to reconstruct the life of the former owner. The film premiered at the Berlin IFF of 2014 in the section Perspektive Deutsches Kino before it toured various international festivals and won the Dokumentarfilm-Förderpreis of Filmbüro Bremen. In 2014, Widmann also became Artist in Residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. One year later, in 2015, he was chosen Artist in Residence at the Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto and at the Srishti Institute for Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India, thanks to a Goethe-Institut program. In India, Widmann had already shot footage in 2013 that he used for his experimental short "Scheinkraft" which premiered at Hamburg Kurzfilmfestival in June 2015 before touring additional festivals.
At the documentary film festival Visions du Réel in Nyon, Switzerland, in April 2016, the feature length documentary "Ein Haus in Ninh Hoa" that Widmann made in cooperation with Phuong-Dan Nguyen premiered. It is about the family history of three Vietnamese brothers whose paths of life split when one of them got lost in the Vietnam War and another moved to Germany as a diplomat. In January 2017, "Ein Haus in Ninh Hoa" opened in German movie theaters.