Heide Breitel on her Birthday

Heide Breitel is about to turn 70. After fifty years in the “business”, filmportal.de lists a whole range of different professions for her: director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, sound manager, producer as well as “other”. She directed IM JAHR DER SCHLANGE (1981, July 16) to coincide with her 40th birthday, which draws up an initial balance of her life, containing reflections on a childhood spent in wartime and the confusion of flight, growing up subject to the narrow-minded ideas of the economic miracle period, breaking out and moving into the women’s movement in the 60s and 70s. From the point of view of today, the film is like a birthday present from her to us: a self-ironic look at both the life of women in 1981 and at German television at a time when the private was not yet being discussed to death in public and still retained political effectiveness. Heide Breitel’s films are part of the Deutschen Kinemathek’s archive holdings (Martin Koerber)