This biopic film about Birgit Hein opens on a train: Hein looks out of the window, pulls a camera out of her bag and starts filming. Her voice is heard off-camera: »I may need to go somewhere else to talk about myself.« The images of the passing snow-covered scenery change to dark green leaves and tropical-looking trees. Next comes a longer excerpt from Baby, I will make you sweat (1994), her film about getting older, her frustration, her female desires and sexual encounters with young Jamaicans. The blurred, grainy, repetitive and flickering images and a partly diffuse, partly rhythmically characterised sound collage create the intense atmosphere of a personal travel diary.

Karin Jurschick’s film allows herself and us time to follow the images and sounds of Birgit Hein’s films. Birgit Hein gives a focused and lively account of her work using visual material, how she moved from art to film and the artistic debates of the 1960s in Cologne. She describes in detail her enthusiasm for the materiality of film, for the grainy quality of film and the possibilities of working directly on and with celluloid film.

By centring solely on Hein as a person and her films, the film gives a very clear insight into the reflective, emotional and also subjective way that Birgit Hein dealt with images and their effect in her films. It also shows how far she travelled, from the structural films and the material films of W+B Hein of the 1960s and 1970s to her films as a solo director from the 1990s onwards.