Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992

It is exactly twenty years since the celebrated Afro-American poet and writer Audre Lorde died in 1992. According to her own description of herself she was: ‘a lesbian, a feminist, black, a poet, mother and activist’. In the 1980s Dagmar Schultz, who at the time was lecturing at the John F. Kennedy Institute at Berlin’s Freie Universität, invited Lorde to Berlin as a visiting professor. This move was to have an enduring influence, for Lorde soon became co-founder and mentor of the Afro-German movement. In her documentary portrait, Dagmar Schultz distils hitherto unpublished and often very personal material of Lorde that portrays her among her Berlin women friends, fellow-travellers and students, many of whom she encouraged to begin writing. These women were later to become poets and academics; they were the ones to create the first German-language works about Afro-German history and racism. The film includes appearances from, among others: May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, Gloria I. Joseph, Ilona Bubeck, Traude Bührmann, as well as Ika Hügel-Marshall and Ria Cheatom, both of whom collaborated on the making of this film.