About the director

Ulrike Ottinger, born in Konstanz in 1942, is a film director, writer, photographer, and visual artist, and is regarded as one of Europe’s most renowned women artists. She gained international recognition with her Berlin Trilogy Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press. Her work spans experimental film, feature film, and documentary. Her films have been invited to Cannes, Venice, and the Berlinale, where she was honored with the Berlinale Camera in 2020.

Press reviews

“The Blood Countess finds its own distinctive form in the liminal space between wildly overgrown camp, delightfully offbeat genre parody, intellectual playfulness, alternative urban archive, and metropolitan exploration. And when, in the end, all the threads converge at the Prater and a midnight dinner takes place in a cabin of the Ferris wheel, Ottinger even leads her cinema back to its roots as a fairground attraction and machine of illusion. After having been in development for almost 30 years, The Blood Countess is now perhaps director Ulrike Ottinger’s best feature film – and definitely her funniest.” (Michael Bendix, filmstarts.de)