13/03/2014 - Alice Agneskirchner is a documentary filmmaker renowned for her extensive work on German TV, which includes Washen und legen and An Appartment in Berlin

It was a TV documentary (“Back when we had only two or three channels, completely by accident, I watched a film from East German TV, called Zwei Deutsche!”) that was Alice Agneskirchner’s defining moment. “It portrayed two lives, one in West Germany, one in the GDR, with no voice-over narration, and it grabbed me! I’d already experienced how people fell into conversation with me very easily, opening up and talking about their lives, and I like that.”

Setting out to devour as many documentaries as possible, she discovered there was a small festival being held in Munich and made contact with some GDR filmmakers. Suddenly there she was. “Documentary is the fascination of everyday life,” she explains. “When you look at it, from the outside and with an angle, it becomes extraordinary.”

One of the philosophical discussions about documentary, as a genre, is whether it is possible to be objective. As far as Agneskirchner is concerned, the answer is, “Never! No matter how hard you try! Even if you go for a journalistic approach you can only tell your truth or that of the people around you. There are different styles of documentary; political, human, even experimental, but you can never be objective. Even if the director is not in shot, they are still present.”

And for anyone thinking documentary filmmaking is an easy option… “They can be a real hassle! I have just finished An Apartment in Berlin, a documentary about three young Israelis going on a filmic journey with me by renovating an apartment where a Jewish family lived until their deportation in 1943. It took me five years to get it financed and then I had six months to make it!”

The beauty of a documentary is there can be human drama to it, and that is Agneskirchner’s standpoint: “Usually most of my films are character driven. I try to find someone who is a strong character, who has ability, not of judging their worth but to become a protagonist in a film. Most people are not like that. I think you can make a film about everything if you have the right protagonist.” 

You also need to find the money! “It’s tough getting financed,” she agrees. “Documentary makers are trapped in the system and it’s the only one we have to make films. I could persuade people to work for nothing but that’s not the point. These films should belong on TV, and many still get made, but budgets get slimmer and slimmer and the open mind gets smaller and smaller.”

As an author and director she always works with a producer and is fortunate in that she has achieved a name and recognition, but she still needs “to pitch and think which commissioning editor, which channel, which slot. I’m constantly having ideas and trying to figure out where and to whom to present.”

Would she, could she embrace fiction filmmaking? “I’m kind of trapped as I like to find the film during shooting,” she admits. “But if I got a good script then it could maybe work. An Apartment in Berlin is the most arranged thing I can do. I’ve done all styles of docs, but I haven’t done re-enactment yet.” She pauses: “Yeah, offer me a script!”

What would a filmmaker be if they didn’t take advantage of an opportunity to push their latest projects? For Agneskirchner these are Die Andere Seite der Mauer (a prison governess who believes punishment without therapy changes nothing), Who Owns Nature? (about what happens when humans and animals claim the same habitat), and The Mountain King Who is a Queen (Lilja Loftsdottir, the first woman to be chosen as one of Iceland’s Mountain Kings, responsible for leading one of the country’s massive sheep roundups).