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Nicola Hens, born 1978 in Düsseldorf, studied camera/cinematography at the Bauhaus University Weimar, the Toulouse Art Academy (France) and the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). At the Bauhaus University, she directed the 66-minute documentary "Omulaule heißt schwarz" (2004) together with Beatrice Möller and Susanne Radelhof about the fate of Namibian children who grew up in the GDR during the civil war. Together with Möller she also realised the medium-length documentary "Shalom Salam" (2006), about a summer camp for children from Palestine and Israel. In addition, Hens worked as a video journalist during her studies and initiated an intercultural film project with school children in Senegal.
Nicola Hens has also worked as a camerawoman on commercials, social media campaigns and numerous films by other directors, such as the award-winning short documentary "Death and the Maiden" (DE/IL 2014), about the Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon. She won the Jury Prize at the Watersprite Student Film Festival in Cambridge (England) for her cinematography in the short fiction film "Elisa" (2016). For her own short documentary film "Babuschka, wo sind die Gäste?" (2014) she won an award at the Grenzlandfilmtage in Selb.
While still a student, Hens began teaching the international master's programme Media Art Film at Bauhaus University in 2015. In 2016 she began work on her dffb graduation film, the partially animated documentary "Chichinette – Wie ich zufällig Spionin wurde" ("Chichinette: The Accidental Spy"), about the life of the French Jew Marthe Cohn, who was a spy for the Allies in Nazi Germany in early 1945. The film premiered in October 2019 in Israel at the Haifa Film Festival. The German theatrical release was in September 2020.