Biography
Antonia Kilian initially studied Visual Communication as well as Art and Media at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). During this time, she gained practical experience as a video operator on Dito Tsintsadze's "Invasion" in 2010/11 and as 2nd camera assistant on his "God of Happiness" in 2013, among others. She also realized video installations and the short film essay "10 Jahre" ("10 Years"), about the ongoing family mourning for her father who died ten years earlier; the film was screened at the Kassel Dokfest 2011, among others.
After graduating from the UdK, Kilian studied camera at the Babelsberg Film University. A semester abroad took her to the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, Cuba. During her studies, she worked on several short and feature-length films, among them as director of photography on Dito Tsintsadze's social drama "Der Freund" ("The Friend"), which was shot in black and white.
Kilian completed her master's degree in Babelsberg in 2018 and founded the production company Pink Shadow Films in Kassel. With her company, she produced Arash Asadi's short documentary "A Letter from Raqqa" (2020), about the aftermath of the Syrian civil war. On the film, Kilian was also responsible for the cinematography. With Asadi, she also wrote the concept for her own directorial debut, "The Other Side of the River" (DE/FI 2018-21), for which she filmed for over a year in northeastern Syria. The documentary tells the story of the journey of a young Syrian woman who fled a forced marriage at 19 and, after training with the Kurdish military, returns to her hometown to rescue her younger sisters. At the 2021 Munich DOK.fest@home, "The Other Side of the River" won the VFF Documentary Production Award, at at the Fünf Seen Film Festival, the achtung berlin Festival, the Biberach Film Festival and the Hessian Film Award, it won Best Documentary respectively. The film was theatrically released in Germany in January 2022.