Summer Cinema in the Goethe-Institut Garden

Maria Schrader: Actress, Screenwriter and Director

Maria Schrader is one of the most renowned and well-known women in German film. She has shone as a leading actress in award-winning films such as Aimee & Jaguar (1999) and with the films Liebesleben (2007), Vor der Morgenröte (2016) and Unorthodox (2020) she has shown that she is also an outstanding artist behind the camera. Her latest film, Ich bin dein Mensch, has also been widely praised and nominated and will be screened at the Goethe-Institut Cyprus as part of the Berlinale Selection 2021 at the end of November. In this year's summer cinema, the Goethe-Institut Cyprus will present three films in which Maria Schrader played the leading role and two which she directed.

The film series begins with the awarded film Aimee & Jaguar, which is based on a true story and shows the love between two German women, the Jewish-German Felice Schragenheim (Maria Schrader) and Lily Wust (Juliane Köhler), wife of a Nazi and mother of four children, during the Second World War. Schrader and Köhler were awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actress in 1999.

The second film, Liebesleben (Love Life), is Schrader's directorial debut and the film adaption of the bestselling novel of the same name by the Israeli author Zeruya Shalev, which is about the dependent love of a young woman for her father's friend. Schrader translates the book's long inner monologues into impressive images, for which the film won awards in the categories of cinematography, production design and music. The film was shot in Israel with Israeli actors.

Schwestern is a warm-hearted comedy in which the main character, played by Maria Schrader, tries to establish contact with her younger sister, who has decided to enter a convent. The secular family does not understand this step.

In Vergiss mein Ich by Jan Schomburg, Schrader plays a woman who has lost her biographical memory after contracting encephalitis. The film was nominated for several film awards and received the cinematography at the Festival des deutschen Films (Festival of German Film) in 2014.

Vor der Morgenröte iis the fifth film of our summer cinema and the second film Schrader directed and it was filmed in 2016. It focuses on the Austrian-Jewish author Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte, who flee to America to escape the Nazis. With Vor der Morgenröte, Maria Schrader has succeeded in making a haunting and subliminally incendiary film on the subject of "exile" that also reflects part of European cultural history.