Angela Schanelec

Angela Schanelec (; born 14 February 1962) is a German actress, film director, screenwriter, and translator.

Her film Places in Cities was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. In 2019, Schanelec won the Silver Bear for Best Director, for her film I Was at Home, But, at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. During the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, in 2023, Schanelec won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay, for Music.

Biography Schanelec was born in Aalen, Baden-Württemberg, in Germany. Her artistic career began as an actress onstage.

Today she is best known for her career as a filmmaker, which began during her time at the Berlin Film and Television Academy (dffb). There, she studied under Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky. She met Christian Petzold and Thomas Arslan, with whom she has comprised the so-called first wave of the Berlin School. During this time, she produced her thesis film, I Stayed in Berlin All Summer, a 47-minute featurette.

Schanelec, Petzold and Arslan found support in the budding artistic scene of post-reunification Berlin, and in the production company Schramm Film, operated by Michael Weber and Florian Koerner von Gustorf.

Critical reception Schanelec's films have premiered at numerous renowned film festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. Critics have generally embraced her cinematic style, which almost exclusively employs lengthy, static shots with little action and ambiguous emotional content, tenuously connected by a narrative. Marco Abel, a scholar of the Berlin School, argues that her films function through "affective images" which reach the viewer primarily through their visual content, mostly without requiring narrative context. Michelangelo Antonioni, However, Derek Elley, writing for Variety, called Places in Cities a "joyless snoozer" and remarked that Schanelec's films "throw out no emotional lifelines for the viewer."

An image from Schanelec's film Afternoon appears on the cover of the book Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism: Depression and the Politics of Existence (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

Filmography

Feature films

Short films 1991 - Lovely Yellow Color 1992 - Far Away 1992 - Prague, March '92 (short documentary) 1992 - Über das Entgegenkommen 1994 - I Stayed in Berlin All Summer 2009 - Germany 09: 13 Short Films About The State Of The Nation (segment: First Day) 2014 - Bridges of Sarajevo (segment: Principe, texte)

As actress 1984 - Die Familie oder Schroffenstein (TV movie), as Agnes 1985 - The Death of the White Stallion, as Anna 1994 - I Stayed in Berlin All Summer, as Nadine 1995 - My Sister's Good Fortune, as Isabel 1997 - Daily Chicken, as Frau Rötting 1999 - Dealer, as Eva 1999 - Dragonland (TV movie), as Mother 2001 - Passing Summer, as Thomas' geschiedene Frau 2007 - Afternoon, as Irene 2014 - A House in Berlin, as Käthe Blacher 2015 - Take What You Can Carry (short), as Angela

Accolades

2019 - Silver Bear for Best Director, for I Was at Home, But 2023 - Silver Bear for Best Screenplay, for Music