After Katharina Pethke returned to her job at the art academy after giving birth she began to realise that what makes her tick an artist was not so easily reconciled with her new role as a mother. Her own mother and grandmother before her gave up their careers as artists to stay home. And now her mum thinks Katharina should do the same. The director examines this dilemma in her feature doc Reproduction, produced Julia Cöllen, Karsten Krause, Frank Scheuffele of Hamburg-based Fünferfilm.
“This fueled an old family conflict,” Pethke underlines of the path she was desperate to avoid. “They didn’t become artists and that was because of their children.”
She adds: “The film is led by my personal voiceover, and the architecture, the murals in the building and the sculptures and the statues are the ground on which the film is being told. And they reflect on the ideals that we as a society are confronted with… the perfect mother and the naked male genius.”
Pethke’s family history is the starting point for a much wider examination, she points out. “Spanning 100 years and three generations of women, the film gradually unveils a conflict relevant for many women worldwide torn between motherhood and work. In the film, the art world and the work as an artist stands as an extreme form of our neoliberal working world where we are supposed to identify to the very extreme with our jobs. Care work stands nearly invisibly [and totally without remuneration] next to the work [for which] we earn money and where we express ourselves.”
Producer Cöllen introduced the project and expressed her long-standing admiration for director Pethke and her work. “I’ve been following Katharina’s exceptional career as a filmmaker for more than 20 years. I believe that her approach in general to making films is almost unique. It is always, on the one hand, radically personal and intimate, and then on the other hand [characterized by] highly analytical precision.”
At rough cut stage, Cöllen and her colleagues plan to complete the film before the end of 2023 and then hope to set in motion a successful festival career before its eventual theatrical release. In Leipzig she was therefore looking for festivals, theatrical distributors, and a sales agent to come on board.
Director Pethke later revealed that the art school where she works and teaches was once the maternity hospital where she was born. Which means “you’re kind of forced to make this film,” suggested moderator Julia Teichmann, Head of Documentary at German Films.
