Jonathan Briel

June 9, 1942 – August 26, 1988

Bodenwerder, Lower Saxony

Jonatan Karl Dieter Briel (June 9, 1942 – December 26, 1988) was a German film director, screenwriter, and actor, born in Bodenwerder, Lower Saxony, and raised in Holzminden. He is best known as a specialist of the literary biographical film, with a body of work centered on 19th-century German poets and dramatists — primarily Heinrich von Kleist, Christian Friedrich Hebbel, and Friedrich Hölderlin. After completing an administrative apprenticeship (1959–1962), Briel founded the Youth Film Studio of Holzminden in 1962. He moved to West Berlin in 1965, where he became an assistant to director Peter Lilienthal before being admitted to the newly founded Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB) in 1966. There he studied under Wolfgang Staudte and made his debut short Der 300ste Geburtstag (1967). His graduation film Wie zwei fröhliche Luftschiffer (1969), a reconstruction of Heinrich von Kleist's double suicide, won the jury prize at the Mannheim International Film Festival and was selected for the Locarno Film Festival in 1970, attracting international critical attention. From 1970, Briel worked as an independent filmmaker with the Sender Freies Berlin (SFB). He developed a series of literary biopics — Jonatan Briels Lenz (1971, ZDF), Glutmensch (1975, SFB/LCB), and Untertänigst Scardanelli (1982) — marked by low budgets, experimental aesthetics, and intense immersion in his subjects. Working mostly in West Berlin, he combined documentary techniques with staged scenes and often shifted between black-and-white and color cinematography. From 1982, Briel was a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and taught at the Universität der Künste. The Kino Arsenal in Berlin devoted retrospectives to his work in both 1976 and 1982. He died in Berlin on December 26, 1988, at the age of 46, with a final project (Hunkepiel) left unfinished.