At its 60th anniversary edition, the Berlin Film Festival will honour two personalities who have contributed, each in their own way, to shaping post-war German cinema.

Actress Hanna Schygulla and screenwriter-director Wolfgang Kohlhaase will both receive a Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement. These honorary awards will be presented to them on February 17 and 18, as part of the "Homage" section, which will also screen five of their respective works.
Schygulla, known for being Fassbinder’s former muse (she appeared in 20 of his films, including The Marriage of Maria Braun, which earned her the Silver Bear for Best Actress in 1979, and Lili Marleen, for which she got the nickname, particularly in the US, of "new Dietrich"), established herself as one of the icons of New German Cinema for her work with the latter, as well as with directors such as Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta and Wim Wenders.

Outside Germany, she has collaborated with major names, including Jean-Luc Godard, Carlos Saura, Ettore Scola, Andrzej Wajda, and Marco Ferreri (whose film The Story of Piera earned her the Palm for Best Actress at Cannes in 1983).

She currently lives in Paris but continues to be involved in German cinema (she was recently seen in Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven [trailer, film focus]) and theatre productions, whilst developing her own projects as a film director and video artist.

Kohlhaase, one of the few East German artists to have held onto his success after the fall of the Berlin Wall, strongly influenced production at DEFA studios. Some insist that he is one of the few screenwriters whose name is as familiar as that of the director.

He has worked with Gerhard Klein, Konrad Wolf (whose final film, Solo Sunny, won an award at Berlin in 1980 and gave him his first taste of co-directing), Frank Beyer, Bernhard Wicki, Volker Schlöndorff and, much more recently, Andreas Dresen.

Known for his fondness for social realism, Kohlhaase is one of the writers to have most successfully depicted daily life in the GDR, but the two strongest themes running through his work are the consequences of German fascism and the city of Berlin.