Doris Dörrie is Kassel Grimm Poetics Professor - Public Events

After Doris Dörrie's original invitation to the Grimm poetics professorship at the University of Kassel had to be postponed in 2020 due to the Corona pandemic, the time has now come: Dörrie will give her public inaugural lecture and a poetics seminar for students at the university in northern Hesse. Her own film excerpts will also be played into her public reading.

Dörrie (born 1955) celebrated her breakthrough as a director with the film "Männer" (1985). Almost 40 more feature films and documentaries followed, for which she often also wrote the screenplay, including the tragicomic episodic film "Bin ich schön?" (1998), the chamber piece-like film "Naked" (2002), "Cherry Blossoms - Hanami" (2008) and "Greetings from Fukushima " (2016). Her feature films are relationship and social comedies in equal measure, working with satire and comic exaggeration. In addition, many of her films are infused with the motif of death. Repeatedly, Buddhist attitudes toward life are significant. Many of her films are set in foreign countries. Her new film, "Freibad," is scheduled to premiere in the fall of 2022.

"Masks and masking, disguises and role-playing are varied again and again. In this way, a field of tension arises between the familiar and the foreign, the humorous and the sad, the bizarre and the existential, which Dörrie spans with narrative ease and plays with narratively in the true sense of the word," explains Prof. Dr. Stefanie Kreuzer, a literature and media scholar at the University of Kassel and responsible for the poetics professorship. Dörrie has received numerous awards for her films. In 2019, she was appointed as a member of the jury for the Oscars. Already since 1997, the Hanover native has been a professor at the University of Television and Film in Munich.

In addition, Dörrie appeared more and more successfully as an author. She received the German Book Prize for her autobiographical novel "Das blaue Kleid" (2002). In her current (travel) book "Die Heldin reist" (2022), she gives an autobiographical account of stays and encounters in the U.S., Japan and Morocco over the past decades.

"With Dörrie, we have attracted what is currently probably the best-known contemporary German film director to the Kassel Grimm Poetics Professorship, who also has a significant readership as a woman of letters," Kreuzer said. "She is also an outstanding appointment because she comes quasi in personal union as a film and opera director, author and professor. Kassel audiences have much to look forward to!"

The events:
Wed, July 6, 2022, 6-8 p.m.: public poetics lecture (Campus Center, Lecture Hall II)
Thurs, July 7, 2022, 2-4 p.m.: poetics seminar for Kassel students
Thurs, July 7, 2022, 6-8 p.m.: public reading with film excerpts (Campus Center, Lecture Hall I)

Contact:

Prof. Dr. Stefanie Kreuzer
University of Kassel
Modern German Literature / Media Studies
Tel. (Sekr. Tamara Schmidt): +49 561 804 3336
E-mail: stefanie.kreuzer[at]uni-kassel[dot]de