Director's Portrait:

Love, life and death and the whole damn thing about wit, humour, great emotions and wide-awake thoughts - Doris Dörrie is certainly the only German filmmaker with that absolute feeling for the unmistakeable lightness of being. Here and now. A passionate observer of the realities we humans inflict on one another, realities which are often so hard to handle, but also mostly amusing and always worthwhile.

The lightness is a result of her experiences and creative activities. From the very beginning, the Hanover-born and Munich-based director has told real stories with her very personal and always revealing view on the actions, attitudes and challenges of her characters drawn from reality. This was the case in her film school, documentary and television films as well as in her features, whether it was in the bizarrely melodramatic debut Straight Through The Heart, the subsequent thriller Inside The Whale or the witty and highly successful comedy Men which gave Doris Dörrie her big break-through with cinema audiences and the critics.

Comedy, tragedy, melodrama - her films avoid being tied down to any strict genre categorisation. They have a little of everything and are nevertheless each tightly structured with a specific central theme. Their dialogues are stylised, but increasingly approach concrete small talk. Thanks are due to Diogenes publisher Daniel Keel that he recognised Dörrie's writing talent and was unwavering in his support of it. Her collections of short stories have appeared with wonderful regularity since 1987 in the Zurich publishing house.

Her view through the camera is a sharp one, dissecting, un- masking, full of optimistic irony and it often burrows deep into the interior of her figures. So as to understand them and to feel with them: "The Americans have a better word for this: compassion". But this view is never a denunciatory one. The things in life occur in moments, in details. This is why Doris Dörrie's films are also always momentary images of the truth.

Nobody Loves Me, for example, is about life in the big city in today's Germany, funny, mad, sad and full of romantic longing: "in the city - and there the high-rise is an archetypical place for me - anonymity is the order for the day. Everyone, in their own funny way and all alone, is on their own private trip. Because everyone comes up against their own brick wall with the desire to experience and feel with others. And if I can't tell anyone else about my own personal drama, then my longing will create images of dreams and utopias."

Doris Dörrie's observations of German reality set emotions and thoughts in motion, whet the appetite for one's own life and confidence for individual behaviour. And for curiosity and openness, two characteristic features of Doris Dörrie as a person: "We'll just see what happens - just like that, that's exciting. Not to organise and plan everything to perfection so that you actually postpone your life until you are suddenly retired."

While her films in the 80's were quite radical, especially as far as the plots are concerned, they have become strikingly more extreme in their emotions in the 90's. Am I Beautiful? is a condition humaine that is as provocative as it is poetic - "something to cry and something to laugh about" as Doris Dörrie herself demands from good films. How strong and self-aware she lives her and our reality is shown in impressive manner in and with this film which she conceived anew and directed two years after the tragic death of her husband and cameraman Helge Weindler.

Filmmaking is - as for Cassavetes and Scorsese - something personal for Doris Dörrie. She doesn't have much time for trends and waves: "I think it would be nice if the situation in Germany would become normal, if it went without saying that a lot of good films were shown at the same time as the not so good ones. I always recommend my students at the Munich Academy for Television & Film to be as authentic and truthful as possible in what they are wanting to say. And, above all, not to have any fear".

Doris Dörrie doesn't have any; she has just made a little low-budget film about two frustrated husbands in a Zen monastery in Japan: Erleuchtung garantiert, made with an amateur video-camera. It will be blown up to 35mm for the cinema release.