Thorsten Trimpop is a filmmaker and visual artist whose work examines the impact of history, politics, and the changing natural world on private lives. His latest film, Furusato 古里, a human-scale portrait of a small town in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone, was shown at dozens of festivals and won the grand prize at DOK Leipzig. It had a cinematic release in more than 80 cities in Germany and Austria and was internationally broadcast on Arte. His first feature film, The Irrational Remains, a nonfiction tale of love and betrayal set against the fall of the Berlin wall, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won numerous international awards. His work has been presented at venues such as the Locarno Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Viennale, FID Marseilles, International Film Festival Pusan, BAFICI and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. He is currently working on a new, genre-blurring feature grounded in a true crime story that sparks a dual narrative about our colonial inheritance and the human obsession with beauty. For this project, he has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Memorial Award 2019. Trimpop is an associate professor in the Department of Film, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Portrait by Anne Marie Stein
