Another Way of Seeing

curated by: Anna Ramskogler-Witt, The Good Media Network

When we ask why women’s contributions to documentary cinema remain underseen, the answer is rarely a lack of films. The films exist. The ways of seeing exist. What has been missing is the looking.

Documentary filmmaking in Germany holds a rich and still under-recognized lineage of women directors. Helga Reidemeister set her own unflinching, engaged gaze against the prevailing claim of documentary neutrality, creating portraits, whose life paths reveal the political within the private. Quinka Stoehr broke a taboo with her very first film, the first German documentary to confront rape and sexualized violence. Aysun Bademsoy has followed the lives of Turkish-German women across three decades with patience and precision, opening perspectives on migration and belonging long before these became central to public debate.

Our selection brings together two of these singular voices: Gertrud Pinkus and Elfi Mikesch. Mikesch, as cinematographer and director, developed a visual language entirely her own. Light and shadow, geometric and sensual form, precise framing, richly saturated colour. Her films combine extraordinary curiosity, intimacy and visual courage. While Gertrud Pinkus put the social intervention on the forefront. In her celebrated docu-fiction on an Italian migrant worker in Frankfurt, found a radical formal answer to her protagonists’ enforced silence. Letting one woman’s anonymous voice be embodied by others who shared her story. Where Pinkus turned constraint into invention, Mikesch turned the camera itself into an instrument of imagination. To watch their films side by side is to understand that film history is shaped not only by who is remembered, but by ways of seeing. Their presence in this first selection is a reminder that the canon we inherited is smaller than the cinema that was actually made.

ANOTHER STORY is about making these connections visible: linking past and present, filmmakers and audiences, role models and the generations that follow.