Biography
Mark Michel was born in Crimmitschau on the 23rd of April 1975. He studied sociology and international politics in Jena, Leipzig, Bath (Great Britain) and Toronto (Canada) as well as visual communication at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. He then started to work as a free-lance filmmaker and author for various TV stations, among them ARTE, 3sat, MDR, ZDF and WDR. His work has a strong focus on the topics disability and inclusion as well as on other cultural, social and sociopolitical issues.
For his medium-length documentary film "U can't touch this – Ein Adler im Rollstuhl" (2009), he accompanied four female dancers from Leipzig’s dance scene and five wheelchair users with multiple disabilities, who worked on a joint dance project. His seven-minute documentary short "Veronika" (2011) about the autistic and bodily disabled poet Veronika Raila won awards at several film festivals and received an number of other prizes. His short documentary "LYS – Licht" (2011) about a dance project with disabled people was also screened at several international film festivals. In 2011, Michel also realized a 30-minute reportage about a Swiss artist collective consisting of five disabled and two non-disabled persons. In 2012, he participated in the Documentary Campus Master School in Berlin. Over the years, Mark Michel shot numerous pieces for TV among others about the paraplegic rapper Graf Fidi, the blind sculptor Dario Malkowski, a sign-language rapper from Helsinki as well as about disabled volleyball players in Cambodia.
At the DOK Leipzig festival 2017, Michel introduced his first documentary feature film "Sandmädchen" ("Sandgirl") about the disabled poet Veronika Raila, who he had earlier made his short film "Veronika" about. After winning a number of awards in Germany, the film was released to German cinemas in October 2018.