Lilli Tautfest

LILLI TAUTFEST (she/her), born in Munich in 1985, is a director and screenwriter who lives in Berlin.

Lilli tells her stories in a sensual, atmospheric, and deeply personal way. At the heart of her work are complex and contradictory female characters who challenge societal expectations and refuse to settle for conventional role models. Her themes range from a feminist perspective to emotional intimacy and poetic imagery, addressing topics such as power, (family) relationship dynamics, body image, desire, and freedom.

From 2008 to 2015, she studied film directing and screenwriting at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. There, she developed her own cinematic style and graduated with top honors and her award-winning thesis film, *ARIELLE*. At the same time, she explored female desire and its representation in film in depth through her theoretical work.

Since 2016, she has been working as a freelance director and writer for production companies such as Warner Bros., ITV, Pantaleon Films, Tellux, and Lupa Film, among others. Together with directors Laura Laabs, Kerstin Polte, and Isabell Šuba, she founded the feminist film collective r.O.K.S. in 2019, which advocates for the visibility and networking of female directors. She is also a fellow of the INTO THE WILD mentoring program.

With the ZDFneo and arte series #HEULDOCH – THERAPY LIKE NEVER BEFORE, she established herself early on as a distinctive voice in the German TV series market. For the SWR miniseries *BAD INFLUENCER*, on which she served as director, co-creator, and screenwriter, she was nominated in 2025 for both the Juliane Bartel Media Prize and the New Faces Award.

Auch ihre früheren Arbeiten liefen erfolgreich auf internationalen Festivals. Ihr Spielfilm MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO LOOK INTO THE SUN wurde unter anderem beim Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin ausgezeichnet und für den Hofer Goldpreis für Beste Regie nominiert. Ihre Kurzfilme waren weltweit auf Festivals in den USA, Kanada, Indien und Europa zu sehen.

In early 2027, her first feature film, TOCHTER DER ERDE, will be released in German theaters. This three-generation road movie, starring Jana McKinnon and Lana Cooper, is set against the backdrop of tourist beaches and archaic landscapes in the Portuguese counterculture scene of the Algarve. At the center of the story is nineteen-year-old runaway Amanda, who falls in love with pickpocket Linda, who lives in a converted bus with her eleven-year-old daughter Flora. Together, the three women travel along the coast, pickpocket tourists, and live by their own rules—until their differing ideas of freedom and belonging clash. The screenplay has already been nominated for the Sehsüchte “Schreibsüchte” Screenplay Award.