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Pia Marais, born 1971 in Johannesburg, grew up in South Africa, Sweden and Spain. After studying Photography and Sculpture at art academies in London, Amsterdam and Düsseldorf she moved to Berlin to study Film at the German Film & Television Academy (dffb).
She made numerous short films, such as "Loop" (1996), "Deranged" (1998), "Tricky People" (1999), and "17" (2003). After engagements in the film business as a casting director and assistant director, she made her feature debut with "Die Unerzogenen" ("The Unpolished"). The film screened at international film festivals and won several prizes, including the Tiger Award in 2007 in Rotterdam. Her second feature film "Im Alter von Ellen" ("At Ellen’s Age") was developed in the Résidence du Festival de Cannes.
Three years later, Marais' third feature film premiered in the competition of the 2013 Berlin IFF: "Layla Fourie" is a thriller set in Marais' native land of South Africa and tells the story of a single mother whose attempt at getting a better life for her little son and herself gets her caught in a web of lies, deceit and racism.
Aside from the half-hour TV documentary "Cari Compagni" (2018), about a retirement home for musicians in Milan, and the collaborative television project "24H Europe: The Next Generation" (2019), Marais was involved over the next ten years only sporadically -and exclusively - in the work of other filmmakers. Together with Martin Rosefeldt, she co-wrote the screenplay for the television drama "So auf Erden" (2017); she was part of the costume design team on Philip Gröning’s "Mein Bruder heißt Robert und ist ein Idiot" ("My Brother's Name Is Robert and He Is an Idiot") and was responsible for casting on "Thomas, der Hochspringer" ("Thomas the High Jumper").
In 2023, Pia Marais began filming another of her own projects: the mystical adventure film "Transamazonia", based on the story of German-Peruvian biologist Juliane Koepcke, who, at the age of 17, was the sole survivor of a 1971 plane crash in the Peruvian rainforest. The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2024 and was released in German cinemas in May 2025.