Reproduction

Story

ESSAY Who is seen? Who is allowed to show anything? With a virtuoso’s touch, the director interweaves her own family biography with the history of the Hamburg University of the Arts (HFBK) and asks questions about sexual equality in the art business. What today is a cinema used to be a delivery room for babies. This is where Katharina Pethke was born. In the meantime, the 100-year old building was taken over by the Hamburg art school. Pethke studied here and taught as a professor, her mother and grandmother were both students here. But their artistic work ended when they had their first babies. Katharina Pethke, herself mother of two children, looks at family albums and researches in the university archives – and layer by layer reveals the venerable academy’s patriarchal structures.

 

 

Presented by

Director

KATHARINA PETHKE (*1979 in Hamburg) was a professor at the HFBK Hamburg from 2012 to 2019. Her short Louisa won the 2011 German Short Film Prize and a Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig. Reproduktion is her first full-length film.