Iris Gusner

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Iris Gusner (born January 16, 1941) is a German film director and screenwriter. She was born in Trautenau, in the Sudetenland. Her father, Hans Walter Beyer, was a council official who was killed in the war, and she took her mother’s surname Gusner. She grew up in Upper Silesia and, in 1945, her family moved west and settled in Leipzig, East Germany.

She finished school in Markkleeberg and did a year of practical work at a wood processing plant. She then joined the film directing course at Babelsberg and, in 1960, was sent to study in the Soviet Union. From 1961 to 1967 she studied at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, where she learned from teachers like Mikhail Romm. Her first daughter was born in Moscow, and she earned a Short Film Diploma for a project called The Insurance Agent.

In 1970 she began working for DEFA, the East German state film studio in Berlin. She started as a production assistant on Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment (1971) and began directing feature films in 1972. Her first film, The Dove on the Roof (1973), was not released publicly in East Germany at first; the original footage was destroyed. A black-and-white version appeared in 1990, and a reconstructed version was released in 2010.

Gusner’s work often centers on women and work. In 1980 her film All My Girls, about six young women who work in a factory, was very successful. It helped open East Germany’s first National Film Festival and won a prize at the festival. Other films include The Blue Lamp (1976), based on a Brothers Grimm story, and Bear Ye One Another’s Burden (1973), which was completed later by another director after initial production. Her films are often described as romance films with feminist undertones, exploring the lives of working women under socialism.

In 1989 she moved to Cologne in West Germany to work in television, then returned to Berlin. In 1993 she directed Sommerliebe with Iris Berben. In 2009 she co-published a book-length conversation with feminist film director Helke Sander titled Fantasy and Work. In 2012 she gave a retrospective of her films at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and many of her works were shown in the United States for the first time.