Recipients
Recipients of the third year 2025/26
The grant for a visual storytelling project in any format and platform by an author with a relationship to Lübeck went to Kristina Dreit and Felix Röben for their film and installation project “Deep Blue Screen”.
The two were selected from more than 90 submissions by a jury made up of Barbara Häbe, director of theatrical/television films at broadcaster Arte, Julia Weigl, co-director of the MunichFilm Festival, and digital communications consultant Marcel Wicker.
Recipients of the second year 2024/25
The grant for a noted writer for a new theatrical film goes to Angelina Maccarone for her project “Back to Scharbeutz”. The second grant, to a writer with ties to Lübeck for an open format visual story for any platform, goes to Anne Döring for her documentary and exhibition project “Drei Farben Zeit”.
They were chosen from almost 90 candidates by a jury made up of Barbara Häbe, deputy head of theatrical and television films at broadcaster Arte, last year’s recipient Annika Pinske, and Anna Hoffmann, programme manager for the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival.
Recipients of the first year 2023/24
Gesine Danckwart works in film and theatre internationally as a writer and director, both in repertory and freelance. She develops her own formats, often for public spaces, radio performances, or plays with avatars. In 2011, Danckwart founded the hybrid bar Chez Icke. Using a human avatar tool, she hiked over the Gotthard Pass with broadcaster SRF, and through Beijing with the Goethe-Institut (2018). Those pieces evolved into the multi-media artists collective Chez Company, which mounts projects at the intersection of performance, sound, film, and theatre. Working with the ensemble of the Deutsche Oper Berlin resulted in the essay film The Making of Blond and the interactive children’s film Karaoper (2022).
Her writing and her own stage works have been performed at the Thalia theatre in Hamburg, the Schauspielhaus Vienna, Nationaltheater Mannheim, Burgtheater Vienna, Schauspiel Cologne, Hau, Deutsche Oper Berlin, at Expo Shanghai, in Taipei, Alexandria, Sao Paolo, and Johannesburg, among others, turned into radio plays, and translated into more than 15 languages. Danckwart developed the installation “Goldstaub” for the Volkspalast, which she went on to turn into a film in 2019, which screened at the Berliner Festspiele, among other places. Her narrative feature Umdeinleben premiered at the Munich Film Festival.
Gesine Danckwart was born in Schleswig-Holstein, grew up in and around Lübeck, and now lives in Berlin.
Picture © Hanna Lenz
Gesine Danckwart: Herzkammer - Ein Escape-Room für Fortschreitende (Chamber of the Heart – an escape room for progressives)
Short synopsis
Do you do this? Look around in an old building, an apartment, and wonder who lived here, and how? Trying to imagine it. Could it have been me? What was it like back then and what will it be like to imagine a different world.
Writer and director Danckwart plans to use the grant to develop a narrative that takes place in an apartment – over a wide variety of eras. For centuries, the domestic sphere has been the inherent domain of women. It is a world about which we know much less than about the history of the actions of the – powerful – men outside the home.
Extensive research in Lübeck, the site of the action, will be developed into a script that allows the audience to move through the narrative on their own. Using VR, people will be able to move around the room and playfully insert themselves into the story – by picking up an object, reading a letter, discovering a picture, or moving through time. In this pre-war Lübeck apartment, we will meet women and their daughters and their mothers and their grandmothers when they were still daughters, in war and peace, as they cook, dance, mourn, die, celebrate, with their husbands and guests; chase down crazy images, perspectives, dreams, and finally approach a finale that points the way to a utopian future.
