Biography
Karin Jurschick was born in Essen on October 17 1959. In 1983, while studying drama, film and media sciences in Cologne, she founded the international women film festival "Feminale" (which merged with the Dortmund women film festival "femme totale" into the "Internationale Frauenfilmfestival Dortmund/Köln" in 2006). Jurschick was a culture editor for the magazine Stadtrevue Köln for five years, and in 1995, she began to work as a freelance author for radio and television, writing numerous features for networks like WDR.
Beginning in 2000, Jurschick directed and produced documentaries for film and television. Her feature-length debut "Danach hätte es schön sein müssen" (2001), a very personal work dealing with her mother's suicide, screened in the Forum section of the Berlin IFF, where it won the FIPRESCI award. It also won the Prix Regard Neuf at Visions du Réel in Nyon, the Förderpreis der Stadt Duisburg at the Duisburger Filmwoche and the Best First Documentary Award at the Toronto Hot Docs Festival.
Jurschick's sophomore feature "Die Helfer und die Frauen" (2003, TV) explored a dark aspect of the NATO mission in Kosovo following the Balkan war: Women from neighboring countries were lured into the region and subsequently forced to work as prostitutes for the solvent soldiers. The film garnered Jurschick a Grimme Award, as well as the ARTE Dokumentarfilmpreis at the Duisburger Filmwoche.
Over the course of the following years, she completed "Ein Tag mit Folgen: Nach dem Mord an Theo van Gogh" (2005, TV), "Zertifikat Deutsch" (2009) and "Die Wolke - Tschernobyl und die Folgen" (2011, TV), which were very well received. She also got very positive reviews for her documentaries "Sieben Stunden Todesangst - Das Überleben der Susanne Preusker" (2012) and "Das Böse - Warum Menschen Menschen töten" (2012).
After her experimental short "Der Weisse Raum" (2015), Jurschick made "Krieg und Spiele" ("War and Games"), a documentary about the use of drones and robots in modern warfare, which premiered at the 2016 Filmfest Emden.