Katja Straub: Martha

Martha shows the view on life through the eyes of an 11-years old girl that struggles to accept her family (the most embarrassing family in the world, Martha is convinced). After many recent moves, due to her father's adventurous nature, Martha and her family just moved to a small Texan town to take over a restaurant. Martha struggles to adjust to the new environment. She directs her frustration onto her little brother and finds outlets for it in vivid daydreams, where she fantasizes about how her life might otherwise be. We follow Martha into her world where reality and imagination merge into one.
Based on my own childhood memories, Martha is about coming to terms with, and eventually accepting, one's roots, blending humor and drama into a short film that combines realism and surrealism.

Katja Straub is an artist, writer, and filmmaker whose films have screened in numerous festivals and museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Images Festival in Toronto, the Viper Basel in Switzerland and the Museo Nationale Reina Sofia in Madrid. Her short film "All White People Are French" received the Special Jury Award at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin in 2005.

Before moving to Texas, Katja graduated from the University of the Arts in Berlin, where she received her Master in Experimental Film. In Berlin she also held an apprenticeship as a scene painter for the German Opera and worked as a freelance art designer and painter for films and music videos.

Awarded the Homer Lindsey Bruce Fellowship and the Warren E. Skaaren Scholarship, she received her MFA in Film Production at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008, where she is currently teaching film and video production.

www.rocketfilm.de