User:Wikingastil/Martina Dase

Martina Dase, 2020

Martina Dase (* 30. October 1959 in Lütjenbüttel) is a German filmmaker, TV journalist and strategic communications expert with particular expertise in non-profit organizations and crisis communications. Since 2016 she has headed the Strategic Communication department of the German section of Save the Children in Berlin.

Life

Martina Dase grew up as the daughter of a farmhand and a bricklayer, later a rebar and assembly line worker in the district of Dithmarschen on the North Sea cost of Schleswig-Holstein. After various jobs in Hamburg, she went to West-Berlin in 1979, where she studied Theatre, German and Journalism at the Freie Universität Berlin. She picked up a love and knowledge of cinema at film festivals and Berlin's arthouse theaters. After working in Berlin, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Bonn and in her hometown of Meldorf, Martina Dase now lives in Potsdam.

Professional Background

Music, Entertainment, Sports

Martina Dase began her professional career in 1988 as PR manager for what was then Berlin's largest concert and event agency. She was involved in the promotion of  more than 300 concerts and tours by such musicians as The Rolling Stones, Leonard Bernstein and Herbert Grönemeyer. She also managed PR for major events of the British Forces in Berlin as well as the launch of the National Football League (NFL) in Germany and the German launch of the Hard Rock Café.

In 1992, Dase organized a professional boxing gala for Jan Hoet, former boxer, curator and former director of the Kassel Documenta IX, to close the exhibition. She brought together boxing greats Henry Maske and Axel Schulz with such artists as Markus Lüpertz, Jörg Immendorff and the author Wolf Wondratschek. The event was covered by German and international broadcasters as well as art and culture publications and was considered a major step in making boxing socially acceptable again in Germany.

Television

The following year, Dase switched to the sports department of the broadcaster Freies Berlin as a journalist and editor. After initially reporting on boxing and doing one of the first long features on the Italian Mille Miglia open road motorrace, Dase produced nearly 50 television documentaries for public broadcasters 3sat, Arte and various ARD networks, as well as numerous magazine articles on a broad range of subjects, from culture and society, to politics and economics. She covered the transformation of Berlin after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, filmed across Europe, Russia and the US and returned, again and again, to the African continent.

She produced a TV special for the first German state visit from newly-elected South African President Nelson Mandela. This was followed by a portrait of the South African Literature Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer and two reports for the Arte theme evening "Africa is Elsewhere" (1998), in which she traced the rocky path of contemporary African artists attempts to break into the Western art market.

Her documentary essay "Aktie - Die Lust am Geld" (Zeit TV, 3sat) about the stock market boom in Germany in the late 1990s, won the German Business Film Prize (2000) and the Herbert Quandt Media Prize (2001). In 2005, she directed the documentary "Shadows of Silence," based on a story by senior investigative journalist Jeff Leen (Washington Post), about the obsessions of a second-generation American Holocaust survivor. She also produced a number of educational films for the  produced numerous information films for the historical Stasi Records Archive, Germany's Green Party parliamentary group, and the German Bundestag.

NGOs

In 2004, after a documentary portrait of Klaus Töpfer, a former German environment minister, and then executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Martina Dase switched to strategic management in non-profit organizations. From 2005 to 2008, she headed communications for Greenpeace Germany in Hamburg and worked as a media advisor to the then Managing Director of Greenpeace International, Gerd Leipold, in Amsterdam.

From 2009 to 2011 she was the first marketing director of Welthungerhilfe in Bonn, where she undertook a project trip to North Korea with the cultural manager and publicist Michael Schindhelm and, as part of 50th anniversary celebrations for the organization, started the think tank "Searchers Unlimited" to look into the future of development aid. Her time at Welthungerhilfe was marked by a rare series of natural disasters – the great earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, the floods in Pakistan in August of the same year, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011.

Returning to her home country for family reasons, Martina Dase founded her own agency "Coming Home" in 2012 to advise NGOs, politicians and private companies. In cooperation with the then mayor of Meldorf, Anke Cornelius-Heide, she also helped organize celebrations for the 750th anniversary of her home town.

In 2016, Dase took over management of the newly created media and communications department for Save the Children. In this capacity, she undertook a press trip to Somalia in 2017 and accompanied journalists to Kutupalong, the reception center for the Muslim Rohingya minority in Bangladesh. In 2019, she led Save the Children's "Stop the War on Children" anniversary campaign. For the 100th anniversary of Save the Children, she developed a series package of high-profile projects and events centered on the global photo project "I Am Alive". The project included an illustrated book with portraits and stories of children in war helped by Save the Children over the past 100 years, as well as photo exhibitions held in the German Federal Foreign Office and at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. Dase presented the illustrated book together with "I Am Alive" photographer Dominic Nahr as part of a partnership with the 20th Berlin International Literature Festival.

Cinema Collaborations

Dase curated a program of "Architecture in Film" movies together with Berlin's Institut für Stadtforschung and the Sputnik cinema. In 2006 she worked for Greenpeace with the distributors of Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and the nuclear disaster film "The Cloud".

In 2007 she filmed "Wenn Wale weinen" (When Whales Cry) about the Greenpeace action involving the salvaging of a stranded dead fin whale and its transport to Berlin for a protest outside the Japanese embassy. That same year, she presented the award-winning Greenpeace cinema spot "You Are The Sea" from the SOS World Sea campaign, which played in theaters across the country.

In 2008, together with Greenpeace International, she helped get Angela Graas' whale hunting  documentary "Jagdzeit – Den Walfängern auf der Spur" off the ground. The film premiered at the Munich's Dok.Fest in 2009, where it won the audience award. In 2010, together with Welthungerhilfe, she helped coordinate the distribution of the documentary film "Hunger" by Markus Vetter and Karin Steinberger.

In 2019, for Save the Children, Dase established a collaboration with the Bad Saarow Festival “Film Without Borders" and a long-term partnership with the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin.

Moderation, Teaching and Jury Activities

In 2014 and 2015, Martina Dase moderated at the Filmfest Hamburg and taught film at her former high school, the Meldorfer Gelehrtenschule, where she produced the dystopian film "Mia's Dream" with students and hosted a master class on cinema trailers. In 2015 she advised the Lübeck Nordic Film Days on sponsorship acquisition.

In 2016 she was a member of the jury at the Festival of Nations at Lake Attersee. Since 2019 Dase has been on the advisory board of the "Film Without Borders" festival in Bad Saarow and on the jury of the Willy Brandt Documentary Award for Freedom and Human Rights, part of the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin.

Africa

In the spring of 1989, Martina Dase travelled to Kenya with her mother – a journey that sparked her interest in the African continent. In the winter of 1991, she traveled the country again and had an eventful meeting with the then ARD Africa correspondent Luc Leysen.

In 1992, she filmed in Ghana, Mali, Cameroon and South Africa. For the Arte theme evening "Africa is Elsewhere" (1998), she followed curator and publicist Simon Njami on his lobbying activities as he advocated access for African artists to the Western art market.

In 2000 she shot a film portrait for 3sat in Nairobi about Klaus Töpfer, the CDU politician and then executive director of UNEP. This experience awakened in her the desire to have an impact on the real work within the framework of an international organization.

In 2009 and 2010 she visited projects in Rwanda, Uganda and Burkina Faso as a board member of Welthungerhilfe.

In 2017, she accompanied journalists from ZDF, ARD, dpa, Deutsche Welle and National Geographic to Somalia for Save the Children in order to draw attention to the impending drought. In 2018, also for Save the Children, she traveled to Rwanda on the 25th anniversary of the genocide, this time with photographer Dominic Nahr for a portrait a woman who lost her parents in the genocide, for their book "I Am Alive".

Photography

Dase has collaborated  with the photographer Dominic Nahr in Somalia in 2017, in Lebanon and Jordan in 2018 and on the worldwide multimedia project "I Am Alive" in 2018/2019. Her interest in photography goes back to her childhood, where she was strongly influenced by French artist and fashion photographer Guy Bourdin and his work for Vogue and other magazines.

In 2000, Martina Dase interviewed Helmut Newton and his wife Alice Springs in Monaco for the Arte culture magazine Metropolis. In 2003 she reported for Arte on the Photo Biennial directed by Simon Njami in the Malian capital of Bamako.

In 2010/2011, together with Ethiopian photographer Michael Tsegaye, she organized the photography project "The Power of Dreams" for Welthungerhilfe, which was loosely based on Die Zeit magazine's "I Have a Dream" interview series and involved portraits from several East African countries.

Her worldwide photo project "I Am Alive" developed in 2018/2019 at Save the Children Germany with the Swiss photographer and Leica ambassador Dominic Nahr, was published in 2020 as an illustrated book by Kerber Verlag.

Filmography

• 1992: Im Dienst Ihrer Majestät, SFB
• 1993: Fern von Afrika, SFB
• 1993: Mille Miglia – 1000 Meilen durch Italien, SFB
• 1994: Rocky – Das Porträt, SFB, SWR
• 1995: Der Clan der Büchermacher, ARD
• 1995: Diesseits von Afrika, SFB, DW
• 1995: Nadine Gordimer und ihr neuer Roman, ARD Kulturreport
• 1996: Bilderbuch Deutschland: Ein Tag auf dem Kurfürstendamm, ARD
• 1996: Mythos Mandela, SFB, SWR, arte
• 1996: Wolf Biermann – Die Folgen einer Ausbürgerung, SFB, MDR
• 1997: Afrikanische Filme am Rande der Berlinale, ARD Kulturreport
• 1997: Bilderbuch Deutschland: Berlin-Mitte, ARD
• 1997: Hip-Hop-Treffen am Äquator, SFB / Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes
• 1998: Alte Fabriken aufpoliert, SFB
• 1998: Bilderbuch Deutschland: Berlin-Pankow, ARD
• 1998: Glanz auf Bestellung – Die Berliner Society, ARD
• 1998: Revue Noire: Der Andere Blick / Avec d’autres Yeux, arte Themenabend
• 1998: Wege aus dem Abseits / La Porte étroite, arte Themenabend
• 1999: Bilderbuch Deutschland: Das Neue Regierungsviertel, ARD
• 2000: Afrikanische Kunst in Brüssel und Antwerpen, arte Metropolis
• 2000: Aktie – Die Lust am Geld, 3sat
• 2000: Der Umweltmissionar: Klaus Töpfer und die UN, 3sat
• 2000: Helmut Newton & Alice Springs, arte Metropolis
• 2001: Afrika im Visier – Die Fotobiennale von Mali, 3sat Kulturzeit
• 2001: Mohn und Gedächtnis – Neue Gartenkunst in Berlin, SFB
• 2001: Zu Tisch … in Wallonien, arte
• 2002: Zu Tisch … in Russland, arte
• 2003: Zwei Länder, ein Sender – Stationen einer Annäherung, ORB / SFB
• 2004: Schatten des Schweigens, rbb
• 2006: Sie sind das Meer, Greenpeace
• 2006: Wenn Wale weinen, Greenpeace

Prizes

• 1996: Deutscher Preis für Denkmalschutz for the ARD Report „Ein weites Feld – Gutshäuser in Gefahr“.
• 2001: Herbert Quandt Medien-Preis and Deutscher Wirtschaftsfilmpreis for the Zeit-TV/3sat-Film „Aktie – Die Lust am Geld“.

Publications and Lectures

Publications

• W88 – Stadterneuerung im Wandel: Berlin-Wedding, Fannei & Walz Verlag, 1988 (Hrsg., Redaktion).
• Stadterneuerung im Wandel – Erfahrungen aus Ost und West (Martina Dase, Jürgen Lüdtke, Hellmut Wollmann (Hrsg.) © 1989 Birkhäuser-Verlag, Springer VS, Wiesbaden. ISBN 978-3-322-94963-9).
• I Am Alive. How Children Survived a Century of Wars (Save the Children (Hrsg.) © 2020 Kerber Verlag. ISBN 978-3-7356-0632-8).

Lectures (Selection)

• „Radikale Kommunikation: Von Bearing Witness bis Breaking the Waves“, Art Directors Club, Hamburg 2007.
• „Überlebensstrategien für Kleinstädte“, Stadt Meldorf, 2015.
• „Mut zum Thema: Agendasetting von NGOs in humanitären Krisen und Katastrophen“, Kommunikationskongress, 2018.
• „100 Jahre Save the Children: Wie die revolutionäre Idee der britischen Sozialreformerin Eglantyne Jebb uns bis heute leitet“, Kommunikationskongress, 2019.

Weblinks

• Webseite Save the Children DeutschlandMartina Dase auf LinkedIn
• Martina Dase auf Twitter
• Martina Dase auf YouTube
• Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin: Martina Dase
• Ich lebe – Weltweites Fotoprojekt zu 100 Jahren Save the Children
• Martina Dase im Gespräch über ihre Arbeitsprojekte

References

[[Category:1959 births]] [[Category:Film directors]] [[Category:German journalists]]