Rosa von Praunheim: Germany's controversial 'gay film director'
The prolific filmmaker recently received a lifetime achievement award for more than 50 years of taboo-breaking movies largely centered on LGBTQ themes. After 150 films, his unconventional art is set to go on.
When Rosa von Praunheim recently received the Saarbrücken Filmfestival Max Ophüls Preis for Lifetime Achievement, he mockingly described it as a kind of "death Oscar."
Having been recognized at Germany's preeminent festival for young filmmakers, the 77-year-old director showed off the self-deprecating wit that has marked the 50-year career of one of Germany's gay cinema pioneers.
150 films and counting
Widely recognized as Germany's best-known "gay film director," von Praunheim sees the moniker as a badge of honor: "I think that worldwide I am the one who has made the most films on gay subjects," he said, adding that his work has covered the gamut of gay, lesbian and trans subjects. He's proud of the roughly 150 films he's made, he says.
Von Praumheim was born Holger Radtke in 1942 in a prison in Riga, Latvia. His mother died shortly after the end of the war in a Berlin sanatorium. He was adopted, which he only discovered in 2000, and he only learned of the fate of his biological mother at age 64. She has been a subject in his films, along with many other aspects of his personal life. He took on the name "Rosa" (pink in German) as a reminder of the pink triangle that the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear in the concentration camps. "Praunheim" refers to a district in Frankfurt where the director once lived.
Filmmaking was not von Praunheim's first passion, he told DW: "I studied painting, and I still paint, I still do exhibitions, that's a mainstay. I wrote, and I'm still writing. I like writing poems. I'm working on a novel, I write plays. Film joined the picture at some point."