FRIEDA – COLD WAR in Final Post-Production
06 26
After many years of development, financing, preparation, shooting and post-production, my second feature film FRIEDA – COLD WAR is now in its final stages of completion.
The project, whose narrative foundations I began developing during my Villa Aurora fellowship in Los Angeles in 2019, has become a deeply personal yet timeless story: about childhood, family, silence, female generational history and the power of imagination in a world shaped by fear.
Told through the radically subjective perspective of nine-year-old Frieda, the film takes us to rural Southern Germany in 1984 — into the Cold War, the peace movement and a family whose silence conceals a secret passed down through generations. The threat outside in the world begins to find its echo within the family itself. Political fear, inherited trauma and magical realism begin to collapse into one another.
When I first started working on this story, I could not have imagined that its historical background would gain such painful relevance again in a time of renewed nuclear threats and growing political uncertainty. But above all, FRIEDA – COLD WAR is a love letter to the universal power of imagination — and to the hope that stories can open spaces in which truth, comfort and resistance become possible.
FRIEDA – COLD WAR was nominated for the German Screenplay Award and is produced by kurhaus production Baden-Baden in co-production with SWR and WDR. The film is supported by MFG Baden-Württemberg, Film- und Medienstiftung NRW and Villa Aurora Los Angeles, among others.
My heartfelt thanks go to our wonderful cast, our extraordinary crew, our funding partners and broadcasters — and especially to my producers Daniel Reich and Christoph Holthof, whose long-standing support, trust and openness made this film possible in the first place.
