
Ute Aurand
Directing
Biography
Ute Aurand was born in 1957 in Frankfurt/Main, and grew up in Berlin. She is a teacher and curator, and a devoted 16mm filmmaker since 1980. She studied filmmaking at the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb) during the years 1979-1985. Since 1985 she began to produce her own films. In 1987 she founded "Ute Aurand Filmproduktion". During 1990-95, she presented the series "Filmarbeiterinnen-Abend" at the Arsenal cinema, Berlin, featuring films made by women, mostly experimental. In 1995-96, organised "Sie zum Beispiel" (Her, for Example) at the Arsenal and Babylon cinemas, in which 12 women filmmakers /artists selected and presented a personal selection of films by other women filmmakers. In 1997, she co-founded the group FilmSamstag (Film Saturday) together with Renate Sami and Theo Thiesmeier, later joined by Bärbel Freund, Karl Heil, Milena Gierke and Johannes Beringer, to present a monthly film programme in Kino Filmkunsthaus Babylon Mitte until 2007. Since 1981 curated film programs e.g. "Lichtgedichte/Light Poems", "Hyacinths" and "Poetinnen mit der Kamera/Women Poets with the Camera" and monographic programs of films by Marie Menken, Margaret Tait and Utako Koguchi. In 1991 she worked on the research project and book „Frauen machen Geschichte – 25 Jahre Studentinnen an der dffb“ (Women make History-25 Years of Women Students at the dffb), together with Maria Lang.
Known For

Jón in Akureyri is the second part of Detel + Jón. I filmed Jón Sigrurgeiersson walking through the streets of his childhood, meeting his filmmaker brother and telling childhood stories.
Jón in Akureyri
Flug durch die Nacht, shot during Ilona Baltrusch's studies at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin - DFFB, explores the relationship between language and image. The film follows the two protagonists, Gretel Kemeny and Martin Peter, through 1980s nocturnal Berlin.
Flight through the Night

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?
Dreaming In The Dark

Experimental film about a train ride. The carriage window becomes a screen, the landscape a mood, the mood a landscape.
Detour

Beavers revisits locations in Berlin first filmed in Diminished Frame (1970), alongside sites in Massachusetts, to reflect on how lived places shape vision and memory. Moving between past and present, the film becomes a meditation on perception, time, and the persistence of personal landscapes.
The Sparrow Dream

A collection of fleeting observations that document the passage of time through intimate encounters with friends and family captured between 1999 to 2018.
Rushing Green with Horses

Filmed in Switzerland and released as part of a triptych with A Walk, Zuoz features the filmmaker Robert Beavers skating on ice. Beavers represents another “new beginning” in Aurand’s practice. She recalls seeing his work in the late ‘90s and “enter[ing] a space beyond the images where one is entirely within oneself and simultaneously in the world … where one is simply present and receives the full gift of the film.”
Zuoz

In Aurand’s signature diaristic form, roses in bloom, farm animals, Orkney landscapes, and scenes of the late filmmaker Margaret Tait having tea are rendered through expressive Bolex movements as well as the director’s active camera, and punctuated by abstract swaths of saturated and shifting colors. The film is an homage to Tait, whom Aurand visited in Orkney.
Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995

A walk, a moment at the beach... And the Japanese filmmaker Utako Koguchi behind the heard piano.
At the Sea
Maria Lang is my very close filmmaker friend who lives in the southern german countryside. We see her gardening and visiting an exhibition of female impressionist painters.
Maria

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To Be Here

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Cape Cod
"Franz von Lucke is my godchild, and I have filmed him since he was very young. Franz is now 26 years old." U.A.
Franz

"Toying with string" is painting transformed into film. Color, threads, stones, various natural elements give birth to images constantly changing in form. This metamorphosis is made visible – we see one thing arising from another and giving birth to something new. “Toying with string is by two sisters, one is a painter, the other a filmmaker. A new quality develops from the knowledge each one brings. The film is lively and leaves a free and happy feeling”
Toying with Strings

Young Pines grew out of three trips to Japan between May 2009 and November 2010. Invited to Japan for a series of film screenings, I began filming in Yokohama, Tokyo, and Kanazawa. Even in the big cities, I experienced how strongly the Japanese feel connected to nature and how they tend to see no contradiction between culture and nature. I found this stimulating and in harmony with some of my own impulses. I wanted to return and film more in other seasons. In Spring 2010 I visited Kamakura, Kyoto, and Nara, in November I went Northeast and filmed in Matsushima, Tono, Miyako in Atsumi, Yamadera, and Nikko. All of my film images have been filmed before the disaster of the Tsunami and Fukushima, but the final editing was done in the following months.
Young Pines

Throughout her work, Aurand frequently makes her camera and her images felt as an active, moving body—spinning, rushing, departing, returning, expanding, contracting, hanging upside down. In A Walk, her film goes walking. The camera occupies a snowy Swiss setting, as Aurand creates a material, tonal landscape that is both nebulous, serene, and wonderfully energetic.
A Walk

Scenes in the park of the Rietberg Museum in Zurich with its collection of Asian, African and Indian art.
Im Park

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Toying With Strings 3
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Noch einmal

An imaginary journey on a ship. We turned the building of the Film Academy into a ship. Claire and Solange from a Jean Genet piece, a polish woman with her Madonna, screaming sailors are a few of the passengers on this artifical journey.