About Me

Lea Bethke is an award-winning filmmaker, director, writer and intimacy coordinator. She studied film studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and is self- taught in writing, directing, camera techniques, editing and production. She realises her own as well as commissioned works, including for c/o Berlin, Sasha Waltz & Guests, the Flying Steps Academy, the Bode Museum and various artists such as Celina Bostic. At the end of 2018, she was accepted into the mentoring programme of the Filmnetzwerk Berlin at the DFFB. In 2020, she founded her production company Sinnefilm to realise her own films and video works. In 2023 and in co-production with Firmament, she completed her multi-award-winning dance short film "Until The Moon Is Born In The West". From 2022 to 2024, she co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film "Last Trip" by Ziad Kalthoum (Co-Production Market Berlinale 2024). Currently she is working on her feature-length Berlin documentary "Cinegeek" about the Filmkunstbar Fitzcarraldo in Kreuzberg.

Love as a principle and in all its forms is at the centre of her film work. She focusses on physicality and female sexuality in the face of social taboos and role models, discusses questions of faith and contrasts humanity with structural violence. In mostly socio-political thematic complexes and with a sympathy for peculiarity, she tells power-critical, transcultural stories of people on the sidelines who rebel against conventions and take self-determined paths with a zest for life.