In the final shot of her film “White Ravens”, the director Tamara Trampe shakes hands with a rapist. Kiril, who fought in the Chechnya war and was taken prisoner, – like the other protagonists in her film – never returned home. The boy who wrote such lovely letters home from the war came back half-mad and molested a nine-year-old. The documentary filmmaker Tamara Trampe doesn’t gloss over this act. But in the last shot of your film you can feel a bond that leaves room for even the most painful.
Tamara Trampe wanted to understand people and their feelings, including those of perpetrators. In “The Black Box” from 1992, the former Stasi officer Jochen G., who trained future spies and prison psychiatrists at the college of the GDR secret service, talks about his work. And also from the traumas in his life – this perpetrator was also first a victim.
They received the Grimme Prize for “White Ravens – Chechnya Nightmare”
Tamara Trampe could get people to speak. “Do you remember a song your mother sang for you to go to bed?” she and Feindt ask people in the streets of Berlin in their documentary “Lullabies” (2010).
Tamara Trampe was born in 1942 in the Soviet Union, and when she was seven she moved to the GDR with her mother. She later told her family story in the film “My mother, a war and me” (2014). She studied German, art history and Slavic studies. In 1970 Trampe became a dramaturge at DEFA, the GDR film production company. After 1990 and the end of DEFA, she made her own films with Johann Feindt. In 2007 they received a Grimme Prize for “White Ravens – Nightmare Chechnya” and the Defa Film Foundation’s Heiner Carow Prize for “My Mother, the War and I”.
In September she was awarded the Honorary Prize of the Association of German Film Critics. Last week she died in Berlin after a long, serious illness, as the Academy of the Arts announced on Monday, citing her partner Johann Feindt. She was 78 years old. With it, the German documentary loses an important voice.