In Times of Declining Expectations

Aart Steinmann

Aart Steinmann was born in Cologne on 11 September 1992. After graduating from school in 2012 he began assisting on various film productions and founded the online magazine "Brigant". In 2014, he moved to Karlsruhe to study media art with a focus on film at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung supervised by professors Razvan Radulescu and Andrej Ujica. After his pre-diploma at the HfG, he continued his film studies in 2016 at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. The basis of his work is the exploration of his own origins and the spaces that shaped and still shape them. Where do we come from, where are we going? The documentary approaches, which he captures on film and video material, he then shapes into installations or movies. The strong influence of reality material on his stories and the experimentation with editing and arrangement of this material, removes the boundaries between classical film and documentaries. In addition to his work in museum education projects, he participated 2015 in the annual exhibition of the HfG Karlsruhe. In 2016 and 2017 he was a member of Ute Aurand's experimental film class and showed his work at screenings in Berlin cinemas. This was followed by an installation for the Frechen-Königsdorf parish at the 2017 Easter Vigil. His scripts were realized as part of educational productions at the DFFB and HfG Karlsruhe. In 2020 he documented the performances of Esther Kläs and Gustavo Gomes at the Kolumba Museum in Cologne. For his Abschlussbuch at the DFFB "Niemcy - Die Fremden" he was nominated for the FIRST STEPS Screenplay Award in 2021. Currently Aart Steinmann is working on a science fiction series for Illuminar Motion Pictures (L.A.) and his debut film in collaboration with lichtfeldfilm (Berlin).