Biography
Alice Brauner was born on January 12, 1966 to film producer Artur Brauner and his wife Maria in Berlin, where she studied modern history, political science and Romance studies at Freie Universität after graduating from high school. After graduating from the Freie Universität, she worked as a trainee at the left-liberal weekly newspaper "Spandauer Volksblatt" and subsequently as an editor for various print media. For the "Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation", founded by Steven Spielberg, she worked as a speaker and conducted interviews with Holocaust survivors. This was followed by a doctorate at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin on "Antidemocratic and Anti-Semitic Tendencies in the New Right in Germany."
In 1999, Alice Brauner became host of the political debate program "Auf den Punkt Berlin," which was broadcast by TV.Berlin. At the same station, she soon hosted her own weekly talk show "Alice," to which prominent guests from various political and social contexts were invited. In 2001, she moved to n-tv, where she presented (political) books and their authors in her show "Seite 17" until 2003.
In 2007, she joined the production company CCC Filmkunst GmbH, founded by her father, as a film producer, and to this day she is on the management boards of CCC Filmkunst GmbH, CCC Cinema und Television GmbH and CCC Filmstudios. As an associate producer, she was already involved in the award-winning feature film "Der letzte Zug" ("The Last Train") produced and written by her father in 2006. Directed by Joseph Vilsmaier and Dana Vávrová, the drama tells of the fate of fictional characters against the real background of the last deportations from Berlin to Auschwitz in April 1943.
The TV comedy "So ein Schlamassel," which premiered at the International Film Festival in Hof in 2009 and was broadcast on ARD in 2010, was produced by Alice Brauner alone and revolved around the current state of German-Jewish relations. In the film, Natalia Avelon and Johannes Zirner play a young couple who, through all sorts of twists and turns, try to hide from her strict Jewish family the fact that he is a "goy" - that is, a non-Jew. Marianne Sägebrecht, Gudrun Landgrebe, Michael Mendl and August Zirner were among those in supporting roles.
In 2012, another drama jointly produced by Alice and Artur Brauner, "Wunderkinder," was released. Marcus O. Rosenmüller directed the film set in 1941 in Ukraine about the two children and exceptional musical talents Larissa and Abrasha, whose friendship with Hanna is put to a tough test against the backdrop of World War II because of their Jewish and non-Jewish ancestry, respectively. The drama won several international awards, including Best Film at the Atlanta, Giffoni, Jerusalem and San Diego film festivals. Alice Brauner herself was awarded the Romy for Best Producer in Austria.
Hannelore Elsner and Max Riemelt took the lead roles in the tragicomedy "Auf das Leben!" ("To Life!", 2014), which was also screened at various international festivals, including Montreal, Haifa, Philadelphia and Warsaw, and tells of the unusual friendship between a Jewish former cabaret singer traumatized by the Nazi era and a seriously ill, disillusioned young man who fight their way back into life together.
Lighter fare was the sitcom "Mission Housemen," released on the streaming portal MyVideo in 2013. In 2017, the 52-minute documentary "Marina, Mabuse und Morituri - 70 Jahre Deutscher Nachkriegsfilm im Spiegel der CCC" premiered at the goEast Film Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, featuring numerous interviews with Artur Brauner's contemporaries and companions, highlighting the role and influence of CCC Filmkunst in German postwar film. In August 2018, the cultural channel ARTE broadcast a modified version of the film, 7 minutes longer, under the title "Der Unerschrockene: Der Berliner Filmproduzent Artur Brauner."
A comedic remix of Fritz Lang's "Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse" ("The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse", produced by CCC Filmkunst in 1960) with new dialogs recorded in Swabian dialect and a modified plot was "Die 1000 Glotzböbbel vom Dr. Mabuse," released in 2018. Also featuring a lot of humor was the culture-clash TV comedy "Matze, Kebab und Sauerkraut," which premiered in August 2020 at the Festival of German Film in Ludwigshafen and was broadcast on ZDF two months later.
A year earlier, in July 2019, the premiere of "CRESCENDO #makemusicnotwar" ("Crescendo", DE IT AT) took place at the Munich Film Festival. Starring Peter Simonischek and Bibiana Beglau and directed by Dror Zahavi, the film, which won the Cinema for Peace Honorary Award and other prizes, tells the story of an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra in which tensions repeatedly arise between the young people during rehearsals for a concert at a peace summit in South Tyrol. The conductor and the initiator of the orchestra set out to overcome these tensions. In January 2020, "CRESCENDO #makemusicnotwar" was released in German cinemas.
Also already in 2019, Alice Brauner led in front of the camera through the two-part ARTE documentary "Jüdisch in Europa" and has since then also hosted the format "bilder der geschichte" for the TV channel phoenix.
In late summer 2021, S. Fischer Verlag published her book "'Also dann in Berlin...' - Artur und Maria Brauner - Eine Geschichte vom Überleben, von großem Kino und der Macht der Liebe" (Artur and Maria Brauner - A Story of Survival, Great Cinema and the Power of Love), which retells the life and marriage of her parents and, as a Jewish family history, spans the arc from their childhood in Poland through the turmoil of war and a new beginning in Germany, of all places, to the more recent past. Shortly after its publication, the book made it onto the "Spiegel" bestseller list.
Alice Brauner is a member of the German Film Academy, has been a jury member of the German Audio Film Award since 2017, and in 2020 will be on the jury of the Shimon Peres Award, which the German-Israeli Future Forum Foundation presents annually with the German Foreign Ministry.