Michael Ruf

Despite being only 33 years old, Michael Ruf brings together an unusual variety of significant experience and interests to his film work.

Through his social science studies (education, sociology, psychology) at the University Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin he first dealt with interpersonal processes in society. In his first semesters he taught as a tutor about how human beings learn and develop and studied human emotions and self-determination. This background enables him to bring a fresh and clear view when making his films.

During his youth he met survivors of the Nazi dictatorship who had actively opposed the regime while he was at the International Youth Encounter in Dachau. These encounters awakened his political interest which still influence him until the current day. As a consequence, he got closely involved in questions of power and marginalization, especially the representation of cultures and gender in contemporary cinema. During this time he also developed the Gender Reader, a book he co-published about the significance of the sexes.

Stipends from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and the Fulbright Commission enabled him to study on the Graduate Program of Critical and Creative Thinking at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In Boston he immersed himself with the questions of when and how people become creative and how they can develop their voices with imagination. In this time he wrote his first short fictional film "Big Freedom" which he carried out later with a budget of 30 euros and won five (!) audience awards at various short film festivals.

This may have helped well-known Goldsmith’s College in London to decide to accept him for the postgraduate programme in "Feature Film" from which he graduated as writer/director. At Goldsmith’s he was taught in mainly classical but also alternative story telling. He further focused on learning about camera work, directing actors and colour in film. In London he wrote “Always Summer” and developed the fictional feature film project „Before Freedom".

The influences mentioned now merge in Michael Ruf's passion to tell stories which are full of life and which describe the condition humaine of the here and now. And it is the cinema, which Gore Vidal called the lingua franca of today, with which he wants to speak about the world – with all its cruelty and beauty and with all its melancholy and wit. Like in "Always Summer", human beings will stand in the centre which in the very confrontation with their own failure and vulnerability embrace life and invite us to follow them.