10 · 06 · 10

Die Friseuse by Doris Dörrie

Mariana Linares translated by Gobi Stromberg

 Originally from Hanover, Dörrie left her country when she was 18 years old to live in the United States. Her first destination was Stockton, California, where she studied theater and film at the University of the Pacific. Then she moved to New York, where she studied philosophy, semantics and psychology at the New School for Social Research. Her studies in film and language constituted the basis of her first job collaborating in the film and language series at the Goethe Institute in the United States. Later on, she became an assiduous critic for the German magazine, Süddeutshe Zeitung.

     Dörrie spent several years viewing movies and then writing about them at the same time that she was studying at the University of Television and Film, Munich, from 1975 to 1978. Contrary to her expectations, her first film was a documentary: Ob's stürmt oder schneit, in which she shared the directorship with Wolfgang Berndt and was the producer of the project.

       The complexity of the relationship between a man and a woman was the point of departure of her fiction film for television Mitten Herz, which was broadcast in 1983. Two years later, Doris Dörrie’s name on the credits of Männer was widely screened beyond Germany, not only because of its appeal to viewers around the world, but also because of its rupture with the usual manufacture in the German film industry at that time. Dörrie filmed Männer on a budget of 400,000 dollars and achieved the highest ticket sales in Germany for any film directed by a woman.

     Although fiction is her predilection in film, Dörrie has directed the documentaries, Love in Germany (1989), Was darf's denn sein? (1993), Denk ich an Deutschland – Augenblick (1998) and How to Cook Your Life (2007);  a recent work that includes the German director’s passion for cooking.
      More than 10 films account for Dörrie’s film repertoire that includes the titles: Cherry Blossoms (2008); Naked (2002), which is a theatrical plot adapted to film; Happy Birthday, Turke! (1992), based on the novel by Jacob Arjouni that deals with the theme of racism and xenophobia; Keiner liebt mich (1994) in which the actress Maria Shrader received the German Film Award, and  Im Innern des Wals (1985).

 In addition to being a passionate cook, Dörrie writes stories, plays and novels, such as: Where do we go from here? and The Blue Dress, which won the German book award in 2003. Both books have been published in Mexico by Galaxia Gutenberg.
Doris Dörrie comes to Morelia to premiere Die Friseuse (The Hairdresser) (2010), a film that was presented in the Berlin Festival, 2010. In a comedy, the German director portrays the life of Kathi Konig, an unemployed hairdresser who returns to the neighborhood where she grew up and where things are not as they used to be. It is 100 minutes of reality, of comedy and good German film that comes to the 8th Morelia International Film Festival, thanks to the support of the Instituto Goethe of Mexico.