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Petra Seeger began working as a director of TV documentaries in 1979, initially in collaboration with other directors. She made her debut with "Gsellmanns Augenfutter" (1979, together with Jürgen Heiter), the portrait of an eccentric Austrian farmer who has been building a 'world machine' out of trash and kitsch objects for 25 years. This was followed by "Schule im 3. Reich" (1980, again together with Heiter) and "Turin - Santo Stefano Belbo" (1984), about the writer Cesare Pavese.
Between 1982 and 1987, she also worked as an assistant director on various feature films, including Rudolf Thome's "System ohne Schatten" ("Closed Circuit", 1983) and "Tarot" (1986); as an actress, she appeared in Thome's short film "Zwei Bilder" (1984), for which she had also written the screenplay, and in Martin Theo Krieger's "Zischke" (1986), among others.
In the years and decades that followed, Seeger concentrated her work on documentaries and film portraits, primarily for the public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk. She made numerous long documentaries about artists and filmmakers. In "Abschied vom Drehbuch" (1991) she documented the making of Edgar Reitz's "Die zweite Heimat" ("Heimat II: A Chronicle of a Generation"), in "Zwischen allen Stühlen" (1994) she portrayed Christoph Schlingensief, in "Film Is a Battleground" Rudolf Thome. In "Wim Wenders, BAP und der Oscar" (2002) she showed filmmaker Wim Wenders at work - after operating the 2nd camera on his documentary "Viel passiert - Der BAP Film" (2000-2002).
In 1999 she founded the production company Petra Seeger Film. In addition to her documentary work, she also directed "Die Schiller-Gang" (2001), a six-part docu-soap about her daughter's girl clique, for which she was also responsible as cinematographer and producer.
Together with producer Joachim von Mengershausen, Seeger founded the production company FilmForm Köln in 2006. With this company she realized the documentary feature "Auf der Suche nach dem Gedächtnis" ("In Search of Memory", 2008) about the famous brain researcher Eric Kandel. At the Bavarian Film Award 2010, it was won Best Documentary. Another FilmForm Köln production was Ludi Boeken's "Unter Bauern" ("Saviors in the Night", DE/FR 2009), an adaptation of the autobiographical book by Marga Spiegel. Following on from this, Seeger made the documentary "Eine Herzenssache - Marga Spiegel und ihre Retter" (2010) for television.
In 2018, Seeger began work on the autobiographically influenced docudrama "Vatersland," a cinematic self-reflection and portrait of the male-dominated 1950s and 1960s. The world premiere took place in October 2020. At the Festival of German Film in Ludwigshafen in 2021, "Vatersland" won the audience award. The regular theatrical release was in March 2022.