) is an independent filmmaker and documentarist

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

.

Born in 1973 in Italy to the German painter Georg Klusemann

Georg Klusemann

Georg Klusemann, was a prolific artist and a children's book author.Although he died at only 38 years of age, Georg Klusemann left behind an extensive body of deeply original work....

 and the Venezuelan sociologist and photographer Elena Hochmann-Klusemann, she grew up in Germany and Venezuela. After completing school in French Switzerland, she went on to study neurobiology in Basel, where she co-authored a frequently cited article on the blood-brain barrier. From 1996 to 2001, she studied film directing at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. Today, she is based in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

.

Her documentary Ima shows her fight to uncover the secrets of her grandmother's survival during the Holocaust. Her style is "very personal yet without being intrusive." The result is "a very honest, unpathetic exploration of the 'third generation'." The film won the Bayerische Dokumentarfilmpreis - Junger Löwe in 2002. Its short version Matrilineal was shown at the International Critic's Week or Sémaine de la critique 2003 during the Cannes Film Festival

Cannes Film Festival

The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...

. Matrilineal was awarded the Jameson Short Film Award in 2002 because of its originality "in portraying how difficult it is to overcome the often essential self-protection of blocking-out terrible events and how liberating dialogue can be. The accent within the film is not so much on the final statement, as on showing the difficult ways needed to break down self-built barriers. The movement of the excellent camerawork underlines the authenticity of the psychological process involved."

Ima is the first part of an envisaged trilogy. The second part Georg (2008), on the relationship to her German father, reiterates Klusemann's attempt to "face the past, the unspoken, with the perpetrators and their children as well as with the victims and their children."

These and her other documentaries, such as The old woman and the sea, Ménage à trois, or Dresscode have been transmitted on Arte

Arte

Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...

and in South America, the US (TV5Monde, Eurochannel), the Netherlands, Poland, or Sweden.

She has also written and directed a feature length children's film.

External links

• Caterina Klusemann's website
• Website on her father and her documentary Georg
• Pay-for review of Ima in De Volkskrant archive
• Review of Ima in Mabuse: Revista de Cine (Colombia) in Spanish, 30 October 2003
• Pay-for articles on Caterina Klusemann in the German national daily die tageszeitung
• Review of Ima from the German daily Neue Westfälische
• Review by Lotta Thorsén of Ima in Swedish
• Review of Ima in Publik-Forum: Zeitung kritischer Christen, 13 July 2001, no. 13, page 24, in German
• Review of Matrilineal
• A German Radio feature on Klusemann's work was broadcast on 24 January 2006 by RBB Kulturradio, Berlin, entitled Lange Schatten. Verfolgung und Exil – Trauma bis in die dritte Generation