Philip Scheffner

Born in 1966 in Homburg, France, Philip Scheffner moved to Berlin in 1986, where he works as an artist and filmmaker. A unique voice in Germany’s contemporary documentary cinema landscape, throughout his career he has been questioning the construction of “truths”, whether media truths (Day of the Sparrow, Harvarie), judicial truths (Revision), or historical or anthropological truths (The Halfmoon Files). Often based on diverse brief news items, his work takes a step back from his themes to examine how they are reported to us. While he scrutinizes how the authorities producing the truth function, his films are also remarkable for their profoundly human approach in which the protagonists are treated as equals and the shooting becomes a chance to engage in dialogue. Scheffner never yields to the temptation of moral certainty, and casting doubt is the driving force behind his investigations, taking a non-dogmatic stance that involves ethics and lends his films a discrete yet inescapably political dimension. His feature films have been presented at the Berlin Film Festival, the Yamagata Film Festival, and New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, among others.