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= SUSANNE BRANDSTAETTER = Susanne Brandstaetter is a film director who worked as a writer/director for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) and now makes cinematic documentary films.

Early Life
Susanne Brandstaetter was born in Los Angeles. She studied art and French literature in L.A. and also in Paris, where she lived and worked for six years as an art agent and English teacher. In 1975 she moved to Carinthia, Austria and began teaching French and English there.

Career
From 1983 to 2002 she worked as a steady freelancer for the Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF). In 1983, she presented a concept for a children's program to ORF: she then created, produced and narrated the weekly „live“ children's program „Krims Krams“ in the ORF Studio in Carinthia for seven years. She made numerous television documentaries for the ORF Central Station in Vienna, travelling throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. She is known from this time for her work 2004 work Checkmate for which she a Romy Award.

In 2002 Susanne Brandstaetter became a freelance filmmaker and producer and founded her company Susanne Brandstätter Filmproduktion / Envision Film .She attended the University of Southern California, School of Film and Televison and in 2005 the training program. As well as screenplay seminars with Syd Field, Robert McKee and Thomas Pluch.

Susanne Brandstaetter's films have been well received by film critics and are also award-winning. Her documentary Rule of Law, which had its world premiere at the International Film Festival of Locarno. She received the prestigious „Vienna Film Award“ 2007 (Viennale International Film Festival) for the best Austrian film of the year. Her shoots have repeatedly taken her abroad: to many different European countries, as well as to the USA, the Middle East, South America, Africa and Asia - where she often worked under extremely difficult conditions in the remotest regions of India, China and Cambodia.

In 2006 Brandstaetter moved to Vienna, where she studied PR and Integrated Communication at Danube University Krems from 2006 to 2008. She is a member of dok.at (professional association for documentary film) and the Director’s Association Austria (Regieverband Österreich), and a former chairperson of dok.at and the Director’s Association, as well as a board member of the Organisation of Austrian Filmmakers.

In 2012 Brandstaetter released The Future's Past , a documentary about the lives of young Cambodians in the wake of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

Since 2014, she’s been teaching at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna („Directing the Documentary“). As part of her teaching activities, she also holds courses, workshops and lectures. Besides writing, directing and producing her own films, she translates screenplays. She has edited many of her own films, and edits trailers.

In 2017 Brandstaetter began working on a film about Trump Voters in Ohio called This Land is My Land, a reference to the Wooddy Guthrie This Land is Your Land. The film premiered at the 2020 Diagonale Film Festival.