Jeanine Meerapfel is a filmmaker, screenwriter and producer - and one of the outstanding personalities in German filmmaking. She was born on June 14, 1943, the daughter of German-Jewish emigrants in Buenos Aires, where she first worked as an editor and freelance journalist before coming to Germany. From 1964 to 1968, she was one of the first women to enroll at the Institute of Film Design at the Ulm Academy of Design, where she studied under Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz. In 1980 she made her first feature film "Malou", followed a year later by the documentary "Im Land meiner Eltern". Her next documentary, "Die Kümmeltürkin geht," won the Interfilm Prize of the Protestant Jury and the German Film Critics' Prize at the 1985 Berlinale. In "Die Verliebten" (1987), Jeanine Meerapfel tells a story of the search for a home by the young generation of guest workers, fractured between the country of their parents and the place of their own childhood. Since then, she has continuously made further feature and documentary films, the most recent being her documentary film essay "Eine Frau", which was released in 2021. Jeanine Meerapfel has received numerous awards for her work. Since 2015 she has been president of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.