International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

Angela Haardt celebrates her 80th birthday

The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen congratulates Angela Haardt, who turns 80 on 24 October this year. The curator for film and media art was director of the Festival from 1990 to 1997 and contributed a great deal to its renewal. Among other things, she was responsible for the expansion of the thematic programmes, for example with the pioneering programme "Confrontation of Cultures" in 1993, the highly regarded symposium "Industrial Film Fascination" in 1995 or the retrospective on Japanese short film in 1996. At the same time, she continued and expanded the inclusion of then-new electronic media such as video in the festival programmes. Even after her retirement, she maintained ties with Oberhausen. In 2004, at the festival's invitation, she curated the major 50th anniversary retrospective "Another History". To this day she is a regular guest in Oberhausen.

Angela Haardt was a founding member of the international forum of the filmavantgarde (iff) Munich in 1972; between 1977 and 1981 as well as in 1984 she was the director of the Duisburg Film Week, which she co-founded. From 2000 to 2007 she taught at the art academies in Berlin and Hamburg and other institutions. As a curator for media art, she advised the Wüstenrot Foundation and the Guardini Foundation and organised conferences such as Dance and New Media, Dance and Media Heritage (both 1999) or a hearing on the situation of women in film (2002).

"In order to preserve tradition, a festival must face up to political and technological changes," Haardt wrote in the foreword to her first festival catalogue in 1990. With Angela Haardt, Oberhausen congratulates a director whose forward-looking decisions have contributed significantly to the festival's enduring importance.

Oberhausen, 21 October 2022

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, T +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda(at)kurzfilmtage.de