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All Pictures (3)Biography
Ulrike Franke, born in Dortmund in 1970, studied theater, film and television studies as well as Romance studies and art history at the University of Cologne. In 1992, she received a training grant from the Filmstiftung NRW for directing. In 1996 she founded the film production company loekenfranke together with Michael Loeken. She made her directorial debut together with Loeken with the cinema documentary "Und vor mir die Sterne..." (1998) about the life of pop singer Renate Kern.
Their second film, "Herr Schmidt und Herr Friedrich" (2001), about two long-term unemployed people from West and East Berlin, won the audience award at the Festival of German Cinema in Mainz (today: Filmz Mainz). In "Soldatenglück und Gottes Segen" (2002), they accompanied German soldiers of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) through their private everyday lives in Afghanistan.
A great success was "Losers and Winners" (2006), about the dismantling of the Kaiserstuhl coking plant, which was dismantled into individual parts and shipped from the Ruhr area to China, done by 400 Chinese workers who worked under extreme stress in 60-hour weeks. The film received numerous awards, including the Grimme Prize, the Critics' Award at the Chicago International Documentary Film Festival and the Golden Remi Award at the Houston International Film Festival.
For "Arbeit Heimat Opel" (2012), the duo accompanied six young people between the ages of 16 and 19 who began their training as industrial mechanics at the car manufacterer Opel's plant in Bochum in 2009. "Göttliche Lage" (2014) depicted the progress of a massive, luxurious construction project in the Hörde district of Dortmund, on the former steelworks site of Thyssenkrupp, and how the long-established residents felt about it. This film earned Franke and Loeken another Grimme Award, the Lorry Journalism Prize and several other awards.
In addition to her work as a filmmaker and producer, Ulrike Franke has been teaching since 2005, among others at ifs Cologne, Filmhaus Cologne, ISFF Berlin and the ZDF Media Academy. At the Cologne Academy of Media Arts (KHM), she became a part-time professor for documentary film in 2017. She has also realized video installations in collaboration with Schauspiel Bochum and the internationally working theater group Rimini Protokoll, among others.
At the Hofer Filmtage 2021, Franke and Loeken presented their documentary "We Are All Detroit - Vom Bleiben und Verschwinden", a portrait of the industrial cities of Bochum and Detroit, their inhabitants and their problems after the departure of the car industry, which they began in 2014. The film was released in May 2022.