Marcin Wierzchowski, born in Warsaw in 1984, is a director and producer. His parents fled Poland to Germany due to the imposition of martial law. At the age of 17, Wierzchowski left school and began working at a video rental store, where he watched countless films and decided to become a director.
In 2012, he completed his secondary education (Abitur) and subsequently began studying philosophy in Frankfurt am Main. In 2013, he transferred to the Mainz Academy of Art, where he studied Fine Arts with a focus on film under Professor Harald Schleicher.
Today, he lives and works in Frankfurt am Main and Warsaw. His first film, the 47-minute documentary Hanau – Eine Nacht und Ihre Folgen [Hanau – One Night and Its Aftermath], was awarded the Grimme Prize in 2022 and serves as the basis for his feature-length film The German People (Das Deutsche Volk)  (2025), which premiered at the Berlinale 2025. In 2021, he was awarded the Gerd Ruge Fellowship by the Film and Media Foundation NRW for the production of his documentary project Traumaland. (Source: press materials for the film)

Paul Leworthy is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, working on a project entitled ‘Reading Reconstruction: Literary Responses to Rebuilding in Postwar West Germany’. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of Edinburgh. The Shape of Memory: Containers, Surfaces and Forms of Remembering in Post-War European Literature, a gold open access monograph derived from his PhD thesis, will appear this year with Peter Lang. An International Fellow of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, he is host of the Connecting Memories Podcast series, founding co-Editor-in-Chief of Memory Studies Review, and Publicity Officer of the AGS.