Director: Dagmar Schulz

Year: 2012

American poet, librarian, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde resided in Berlin, Germany during a critical personal and political time. This documentary chronicles an untold chapter of Lorde’s life: her empowerment of Afro-German women, as she challenged white women to acknowledge the significance of their white privilege and to deal with difference in constructive ways.

Lorde's influence on the German political and cultural scene was during a decade that brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany. Her significant contributions, spanning discourses on racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, classism, and homophobia within the Black movement and the Black and white women’s movement, continue today.

Lorde’s encouragement that Afro-German women begin writing their history and stories and form political networks in Germany influenced authors such as May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye and Ika Hügel-Marshall. During these years, Lorde’s diagnosis of terminal cancer left her American doctors without hope for her survival. Berlin became her third home where she received naturopathic treatment in part responsible for the next eight years of her life. For the first time, Dagmar Schultz’s archival video- and audio recordings and footage are available to a wide public, including stunning and endearing images of Audre Lorde off stage.