Werner Penzel

Werner Penzel was born in 1950 and grew up in Hannover, Berlin and Cologne. In the 1960s, he started playing music in various rock-bands and wrote poetry before turning to independent filmmaking. In the 1970s he worked and lived with the Brazilian theatre company “Oficina” in Rio De Janeiro, accompanied the “Living Theatre” in Europe, studied at the Munich Film Academy, traveled through South and Central America, North Africa, India, the USA and Japan, where he spent time practicing in the Zen monasteries Eihei-ji and Antaiji. After Vagabunden Karawane (1980), Bokra-Piraten der Stille (1984), Adios al Odio (1986), and other movies, in 1987 he established the production company “CineNomad” together with Nicolas Humbert, a collaboration, which results in movies such as Step Across the Border (1990) and Middle of the Moment (1995), the film-triptych Three Windows (1999), the chamber-film Why Should I Buy a Bed if All I Want is Sleep? (1999) and the jazz film Brother Yusef (2005).

With Nicolas Humbert, Nico Hofmann, Christian Wagner, Lutz Konermann, Fosco & Donatello Dubini, Penzel founded the filmmakers’ cooperative “Der Andere Blick”.

Since 1995 Werner Penzel has taught at various film and art schools in Munich, Berlin, Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano, Kyoto and Hanoi. In 2006, together with Ayako Mogi, Res Balzli, Marion Neumann and Christoph Balmer, he founded "jourparjour compagnie" in Estavayer-le-Lac, Switzerland, which supports the cultural exchange between Western and Eastern artists. In 2009 he moved to the island of Awaji-shima in Japan founding “nomadomura” together with Ayaka Mogi and Misa Shimomura to continue movie-making, music and art, and kept working on cultural exchange and human research projects.