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Aelrun Goette was born in East Berlin in the GDR on July 6, 1966. As a teenager, she had to leave school early because of a system-critical patch of the church peace movement "Schwerter zu Pflugscharen" (Swords to Plowshares) on her jacket. She subsequently trained as a nurse and worked for a time on psychiatric wards. She also worked as a costume and set designer at the Landestheater Altenburg and, shortly before the German reunification, as a model. From 1990 she caught up on her A-levels and then took up philosophy studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin, after which she studied directing at the Babelsberg Film Academy. She graduated with a diploma in 2000.
During her studies she pursued various other activities. She appeared as an actress in the daily soap "Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten" broadcast on RTL, worked as a theater director and as a correctional officer at the Plötzensee youth correctional facility. In the context of the latter job, her first documentary feature film "Ohne Bewährung - Psychogramm einer Mörderin" was made in 1997. The film, which was co-produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk, focuses on the story of a fifteen-year-old girl who tortured a thirteen-year-old girl to death. Goette became the executioner of the perpetrator, with whom she conducted numerous interviews for the film.
Her next documentary, "Feldtagebuch - Allein unter Männern" (first broadcast in 2002 on SWR), in which Goette accompanies four of the first female recruits in combat units of the Bundeswehr with their expectations and hopes through their basic training, led in the aftermath to a committee of inquiry in the Bundesrat and the 2020 annual report of the German Bundestag's commissioner for the armed forces noted: "The documentary 'Feldtagebuch - Allein unter Männern' [...] caused uproar in the year under review. The film documented misconduct in the tone of trainers and inappropriate leadership behavior by superiors. In two cases, judicial disciplinary proceedings have been initiated. The facts of the case were dealt with in detail by the units concerned, with the decisive participation of the Army Command, in unit commanders' meetings and in officers' and NCOs' advanced training courses."
Goette's third feature-length film, "Die Kinder sind tot" (2003), won several awards, including the 2004 German Film Award in Gold. The documentary deals with the case of Daniela J., a 23-year-old mother of four who, in the summer of 1999, left her two sons in her apartment for days, where they died of thirst. Not aiming for the spectacular, Goette avoids common explanatory patterns and, among other things, provides insight into a world that has been written off by society.
"I want to learn something through the subject matters I deal with," Goette said in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and her subsequent films also focused on people, especially women, in borderline situations. For example, two years later she directed the feature film "Unter dem Eis" ("Under the Ice", 2005), in which Bibiana Beglau plays a mother who wants to protect her seven-year-old son, guilty of the death of a playmate, from the police. Beglau was awarded the Grimme Prize for her portrayal, Goette won in the Best Director category, Jens Harant for Best Cinematography. The jury explained its decision as follows: "'Unter dem Eis' is an outstanding film; a relentlessly intense intimate flm [...]. Magnificent, immediate. Dense and moving."
Also winning Grimme awards for directing (Goette), writing (Martina Mouchot) and acting (Michelle Barthel) was her social drama "Keine Angst," which deals with child poverty in Germany and revolves around a 14-year-old and her alcoholic mother. The film premiered at the 2009 Munich Film Festival and was first broadcast on ARD in March 2010.
Subsequently, Goette realized the TV film "Die elegante Lösung" (2011), an episode of the highly acclaimed crime series "Unter Verdacht" with Senta Berger as an internal investigator, who in this case has to deal with the inhumane treatment of refugees from Africa by a border protection agency on the Italian Mediterranean coast. Premiered at the 2011 Munich Film Festival, "Die elegante Lösung" received the Marl Media Prize for Human Rights in 2013.
Her TV film "Ein Jahr nach morgen," about the aftermath of the actions of a 16-year-old who shot two people with her father's hunting rifle, won the Günter Rohrbach Film Prize in 2012. In 2015, "Im Zweifel" premiered at the Munich Film Festival, about a pastor and emergency chaplain (Claudia Michelsen) who suspects her husband and son are connected to a fatal traffic accident.
Her contribution to the "Tatort" series "Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt," which premiered at the Hof Film Festival in 2016, also received a lot of attention. For the last case of the Constance investigator Klara Blum (played by Eva Mattes), Goette brought the great Fassbinder actresses Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen together in front of the camera for the first time again. In the film the three women take radical action against right-wing excesses in society as roommates of a left-wing senior citizens' flat-sharing community. In an interview with ARD, Goette said about her intentions: "I wanted to tell a radical story about our time, which is out of joint and throws on the evil cloak of humorous lightness. A poetic parable that culminates in the question of to whom and why one bows." Goette had previously made her first contribution to the "Tatort" series with the crime thriller "Der glückliche Tod," which aired eight years prior and starred Ulrike Folkerts as the investigating detective. The film, which dealt with assisted dying, was nominated for the Television Film Award of the German Academy of Performing Arts in 2008.
The intimate "Atempause" (2017), also made for television, then focused on the very different ways in which two parents deal with the news that their boy has been declared brain dead after a soccer accident and on how different cultures deal with grief and death. This film also received very positive reviews.
In 2019, Aelrun Goette was awarded the certificate of honorary professor at Babelsberg Film University for the acting, directing and screenwriting/dramaturgy courses, "in recognition of her outstanding artistic achievements".
In 2021, filming began on a feature film that Goette had been working on off and on since 2014: "In einem Land, das es nicht mehr gibt" ("In a Land That No Longer Exists"), set in the now largely unknown fashion scene of the GDR, is about a 19-year-old who becomes a sought-after photo model practically by chance - a parallel to Goette's own youth. The film was released in the fall of 2022.