Sandra Ehlermann
Sandra Ehlermann grew up in the Rhineland and now lives in Berlin. During her Theater, Film and Television Studies at the University of Cologne, she and a small, dedicated group of students got their accreditations for the Berlinale every year and passionately attended the screenings of the most exciting films at the Forum. In 1996 she made her first short fiction film.
Throughout her life, Sandra has spent time in the US. She graduated from high school in Arizona before her German Abitur and later, parallel to her studies in Cologne, completed a film course at the Tisch School of the Arts and an acting course at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in New York, where she met her partner, an Irish writer and cartoonist, with whom she has lived in Berlin since 1997. Their three daughters, now grown, were born in Berlin-Schöneberg, where the family still lives.
After studying film directing at the Film University “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam-Babelsberg and working for many years as an editor and dramaturge for WDR, ZDF and several film funding institutions, she founded Scriptmakers in 2014, a database with now over 600 online profiles of professional screenwriters. With this, Sandra invented the profession of screenwriter-casting – in times when good writers with different special knowledge and backgrounds are intensively sought, her phone rings frequently. She organises Writers’ Circles and pitching workshops and hosts pitching events. Her perspective on screenwriting is analytical and creative.
Sandra loves memberships: She is a member of VeDRA, the Association for Film and Television Dramaturgy, the Association for the Advancement of German Children’s Films, the German Association of Documentary Filmmaking, the Filmclub 813 and the Garden Allotment Association in Berlin-Gleisdreieck. In 2020, the first Corona-year, she and some of her fellow professional film women was temporarily entrusted with the leadership of Pro Quote Film, and organised, among other things, the online congress “Share your Power” until a new board could be elected. In addition, she was and is on several juries, for example at the Berlin Senate for Culture (Fund for Women Film and Video Artists) and the Debut Fiction Film Jury at Biberach Film Festival. Since 2023, she is a member of the Fiction Commission of the Zurich Film Foundation. Scriptmakers, together with the German Screenwriters Association, the Master School Drehbuch and some authors, has been sponsoring the Screenplay Award of the film festival Achtung Berlin for several years.
(Photo: © Anita Back)
