Our guest on 21.11.2010 Doris Dörrie, Director and Writer

Doris Dörrie is the most successful and probably the most productive film director in Germany. The 54-year-old has made more than 20 movies to date, and won all of the country's most important film prizes. Doris Dörrie was born in 1955 in Hanover, the capital of the state of Lower Saxony. After studying film and theater in the US for two years, she returned to Germany in 1975. Her first projects were documentary films, but she also began making feature films in 1981. She represented Germany at the Venice Film Festival with her first film for cinema, "Mitten ins Herz", or "Straight Through the Heart". Her international breakthrough came in 1986 with the movie "Männer", or "Men". Five million people went to see it Germany alone, and its success brought Dörrie to the attention of Hollywood. But the director prefers to work in Germany and not expose her work to the constraints of large-scale US productions. The complex relationships between affluent members of German society is a subject Dörrie returns to time and time again. When her first husband died on the film set in 1996, she sensed her interest in Buddhism grow, and the subjects of death, grieving and parting appeared more frequently in her work. She is also fascinated by Japan, and three of her films are set there. Today, Dörrie lives in the Allgäu region of Bavaria, a place the woman from northern Germany now calls her adoptive home.

(First broadcast 07 March 2010)