Katja Raganelli

Documentary about film director Marta Meszaros featuring on-set interviews with the director and creative collaborators

A one-hour biographical documentary about Alice Guy-Blaché, one of the first women to direct films.

By the time director Katja Raganelli arrived in California to make a film about Dorothy Arzner in 1980, Arzner had passed away in a car accident. Nonetheless, Raganelli visited Arzner’s desert home and retraced the pioneering filmmaker’s career in this documentary, using Arzner’s trove of photographs, as well as interviews with her leading lady Esther Ralston, to create this nuanced portrait of a woman who bucked every norm and defied societal expectation.

This 1983 German documentary by Katja Raganelli features director Joan Micklin Silver; her husband, Ray Silver; and a handful of key collaborators discussing her film work, from her debut feature HESTER STREET through her romantic comedy HEAD OVER HEELS.

Documentary about American film director and actress Barbara Loden featuring an interview filmed in 1980.

A documentary about French film director Agnès Varda on the set of her 1977 film ONE SINGS, THE OTHER DOESN'T. It includes interviews with Varda and the lead actors in the film.

An intimate portrait of director Mai Zetterling that includes interviews with Zetterling, David Hughes (Zetterling’s ex-husband and the cowriter of LOVING COUPLES, NIGHT GAMES, and THE GIRLS), and actors Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, and Bibi Andersson.

Documentary about the Woman in Ingmar Bergman's Movies

In the later stages of her research into the history of cinema made by women, Katja Raganelli became interested in Margery Wilson, then one of the very few living women who had been able to direct fiction features during the silent period. What survives of Wilson’s art is her acting. For her work as a director, besides sundry photos and newspaper clippings, we only have Wilson’s recollections, as recorded by Raganelli.

Katja Raganelli’s sole excursion into the realm of avant-garde cinema was this focus on Austrian experimental film axiom Valie Export. This portrayal of the filmmaker is quite special as it presents Export at a very particular moment in her career, during the shooting of a fiction feature, Menschenfrauen (1980), with which she was able to break into the avant-garde mainstream, shedding the skin of her path-breaking, often performance-based early works.

It’s quite telling that Katja Raganelli chose the animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger as her gateway figure into German cinema’s past. Like Alice Guy-Blaché, she was prolific, and worked in all kinds of formats, including commercials and animated interludes for fiction features. More than Guy-Blaché, though, she was an inventor of forms and techniques whose genius was admired by the likes of Bertolt Brecht. It says a lot about film history that Reiniger remains still a specialists’ darling…

Katja Raganelli was not solely interested in female filmmakers, but women artists in general. This early work offers a portrait of painter-educator-pacifist Anna Ottonie Krigar-Menzel, also known as Annot. Suppressed by the Nazis and forced into exile, it’s tempting to consider Annot a key inspiration for Raganelli, as one of her main works is a late 1920s cycle of paintings called Faces of Working Women, depicting female surgeons, physiotherapists, all manner of women’s labour.

A film by Katja Raganelli

Joan Tewkesbury reflects on her collaboration with Robert Altman and her first feature, Old Boyfriends (1979). This excerpt, from an unfinished working print by Katja Raganelli for the 2024 Robert Altman retrospective at the Munich Film Museum, serves as a starting point to explore her production process, how she found collaborators like Tewkesbury, her development of project ideas from these encounters, and why some projects never reached completion.

Documentary about French film actress and director Delphine Seyrig featuring an interview filmed in 1977.

Rabe Perplexum was one of the earliest West German artists to live in a non-binary gender identity. A key figure (for all their fringeness) of the Munich scene in the 1980s, Rabe’s paintings and performances were soon forgotten after their too early death at the age of 39. Interest in Rabe has since resurged, with Raganelli’s portrait becoming a key document of this visionary.

By the water, under the gleaming sun, a rebel couple needs to kill a dictator and his wife. All cool, all casual. A splendid mix of Eurospy with real political tensions in the background – assassination attempts and bombings included. South America, the Balkans, wherever you went, violence was in the air.

A film by Katja Raganelli