Lea Bethke is an award-winning filmmaker, video artist and production manager. She studied film studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and is self- taught in writing, directing, camera techniques, editing and production. Since 2016, she has been running her own production team 99 Motions Production, with which she has successfully realised commissioned works. At the end of 2018, she was accepted into the mentoring programme of the Filmnetzwerk Berlin at the DFFB. In 2020, she founded her production company Sinnefilm to realise her own films and video works. In co-production with Monic Films, she completed her first own and multi-award-winning dance short film “Until The Moon Is Born In The West” in 2023. From 2022 to the end of 2023, she co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film “Last Trip” by Ziad Kalthoum, which was invited to the Co-Production Market at this year’s Berlinale. She is currently working on her feature-length Berlin documentary “Cinegeek” about the Filmkunstbar Fitzcarraldo in Kreuzberg.

Love as a principle and in all its forms is at the centre of her film work. She focuses on physicality and female sexuality in the face of social taboos and role models, discusses questions of faith and contrasts humanity with structural violence. In mostly socio-political thematic complexes and with a sympathy for peculiarity, she tells power-critical, transcultural stories of people on the sidelines who rebel against conventions and take self-determined paths with a zest for life.