Gottfried Kolditz
Gottfried Kolditz ( born December 14, 1922 in Altenbach, Amtshauptmannschaft Grimsby, † June 15, 1982 in Dubrovnik, SR Croatia, Yugoslavia ) was a DEFA film director and screenwriter. He was almost 20 films one of the most productive and most continuously working DEFA directors of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of his films were huge audience in the GDR.
Life
Born the son of a farm laborer in Altenbach, studied in Leipzig German Kolditz 1945-1949, and 1947-1949 at the Academy of Music and Theatre " Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy " Leipzig acting and directing. Early 50s doctorate Kolditz in Leipzig with Theodor Frings. In parallel, he had already started to work as an actor and director at various theaters - in Leipzig, Dresden, Rostock and Karl- Marx-Stadt, where he was most recently senior director.
In 1955 he went as a musical consultant for music movies Zar und Zimmermann and Mazurka love for DEFA.
In 1958 he was shooting for the film series Stingers his first feature film The young Englishman by Wilhelm Hauff with Jean Soubeyran, stylistically leaning towards the expressionism. In the following two decades Kolditz, who was considered to experiment worked in a variety of genres: he turned fairy tale movies, comedies, musicals and science fiction films. With signals - A space adventure he tried in 2001 to technically Stanley Kubrick: A Space Odyssey to lean. The film was awarded in Paris for his animated sequences.
End of the 1960s Kolditz had also begun to write the screenplays for his films. From him came already under the pseudonym Lothar Koch, the idea at the Heinz Erhardt comedy triplets on board.
The most lasting but his name was connected with the very popular in the GDR DEFA Indian films actor Gojko Mitic with the Yugoslav in the lead role, of which he directed three. Originally called - even ideological - designed in response to the Karl May movies, they evolved into a genre of its own in the GDR. Kolditz died just before filming of a new Indian film while he was preparing a pirate two-parter as a German - German co-production.
Since the DEFA had a political enlightenment job ( the right, ie to promote socialist consciousness ), meant to focus on genre films ( pejoratively dismissed as entertainment films ) from the outset and extensively ignorance by the criticism. So apolitical films but apparently also had, they were yet romantic protest against disciplining and permanent duty in an ideological to the aesthetics into film industry, they still defended the existence of a liberating pleasure principle and thus the right of the individual to a life beyond the daily rigors.
His son Stefan Kolditz is a successful writer and playwright.