For further information please download the respective Forum Expanded sheet (PDF).
Referencing sixties B-movies like They Saved Hitler’s Brain and The Brain That Would Not Die, Ulrike’s Brain finds Doctor Julia Feifer (Susanne Sachsse) arriving at an academic conference with an organ box. Inside the box: the brain of Ulrike Meinhof, which was saved by the authorities along with the brains of the three other leaders of the RAF after their deaths in Stammheim prison. Doctor Feifer can communicate telepathically with Ulrike’s brain, which is directing her to lead a new feminist revolution. To that end, she is searching for the ideal female body to transplant Ulrike’s brain into. At the same time, her arch-rival, Detlev Schlesinger, an extreme right-wing ideologue, arrives at the conference with the ashes of Michael Kühnen, the former German neo-Nazi leader and infamous homosexual who died of AIDS in 1989. When the two Frankenstein’s monsters of the extreme left and the extreme right meet, chaos ensues.
Bruce LaBruce, born in 1964 in Southampton, Ontario, Canada, is a filmmaker, photographer, writer, and artist based in Toronto. Along with a number of short films, he has written and directed nine feature films, including The Raspberry Reich und Otto; or, Up with Dead People. Additionally, he has directed a number of music videos and written and directed theatrical works. He has written a premature memoir called ‘The Reluctant Pornographer’ (1998) and a more recent one called ‘Porn Diaries: How to Succeed in Hardcore Without Really Trying’ (2016), contributed to a variety of international magazines, newspapers, and websites as both a writer and photographer, and been a regular columnist over the years for the magazines ‘Eye,’ ‘Exclaim!’ and ‘Vice.’ As a visual artist he has had numerous gallery shows around the world. His films have been screened in international film festivals and honored with retrospectives.
Production: Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion, Berlin
Screenplay: Bruce LaBruce
Camera: Bernd Schoch, Heiko Alberti
Cast: Gertrude Stammheim, Susanne Sachsse, Jonathan Johnson, Saskia Timm
Running time: 55 min
Language: German, English
Photo: © Bruce LaBruce
