Ulrike's Brain

Last updated
Ulrike's Brain
Directed by Bruce LaBruce
Written byBruce LaBruce
Starring Susanne Sachsse
Release date
  • 11 February 2017 (2017-02-11)(Berlin)
Running time
55 minutes
CountriesGermany
Canada
LanguageEnglish

Ulrike's Brain is a 2017 German-Canadian drama film directed by Bruce LaBruce. It was screened in the Forum section at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival. [1]

The film, described by LaBruce in advance interviews as a sequel of sorts to his early film The Raspberry Reich , [2] stars Susanne Sachsse as Julia Feifer, an academic who possesses and can communicate with the brain of German Red Army Faction radical Ulrike Meinhof. [1] She is seeking to transplant the brain into a new body so that she can resurrect Meinhof and revive her goal of socialist and feminist revolution, but her plans are complicated when her archrival Detlev Schlesinger, an extreme right-wing ideologue, arrives with identical plans for the surviving brain of German neo-Nazi leader Michael Kühnen. [1]

The film, a spoof of the 1960s B-movie subgenre of mad scientists preserving human brains, is thematically linked with LaBruce's feature film The Misandrists , which premiered at Berlin's Panorama program in the same week. [3] Although both films were made in Germany, Ulrike's Brain received some production funding from the Canada Council for the Arts while The Misandrists did not.

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