The Forest for the Trees

Maren Ade is a director, scriptwriter and producer. She was born in Karlsruhe in 1976, and lived there until she took her final school examinations. Ade was already interested in film during her schooldays, often going to the cinema and using her super 8 video camera to make a first, half-hour film “with friends by the local quarry pond” about a girl who refuses to speak. Immediately after finishing school, Ade spent several months as an intern at Claussen+Woebke Filmproduktion in Munich. From 1998, she studied (initially) in the Production class at the Munich University of Television & Film (HFF). In 2000 she made and wrote the screenplay for her first short film as a director, Ebene 9, which was premiered at the Hof Film Festival. In the same year, together with fellow student Janine Jackowski, Ade founded the production company Komplizen Film. Together with this company, she has produced all of her own films to date, as well as several films by other directors. Her transfer to the Direction class at the HFF was followed by Vegas, a short exercise in direction about a man addicted to gambling, and in 2003 by Ade’s first full-length feature film The Forest for the Trees. After its premiere in Hof it screened at many international festivals, including Toronto in 2004 and Sundance in 2005, where it won the Special Jury Award, as well as several other international prizes. That year the film was also nominat­ed for the German Film Award. In the meantime, Ade has completed a new film as a director, Alle Anderen, and con­tinues to work as a producer (most recently on Hotel Very Welcome, 2007). —German Films Quarterly