21.12.1956–?
Bady Minck
Bady Minck was born in Ettelbruck, studied sculpture and experimental film in Vienna, and went on working between Vienna and Luxembourg. Her short films have been shown since 1989 in Cannes, Rotterdam, Locarno and Berlin, and in 2007 her film “Free Radicals” screened at the Venice Biennale. As a producer she has worked with Jessica Hausner and Dieter Berner.
Biography
Bady Minck was born under another name: she was originally Madeleine Binck. The pseudonym by which she is known appeared around 1981.
She came into the world on 21 December 1956 in Ettelbruck, Luxembourg. She went to Vienna to study. At the Academy of Fine Arts she worked in sculpture, and at the University of Applied Arts (Hochschule für angewandte Kunst) in experimental film.
Her first known work, the four-minute “Blood in the Track” (Blut in der Spur, 1979), was made together with Angela Summereder: Minck wrote the screenplay and co-directed the film. In 1988, with Stefan Stratil, she made the eight-minute “The Man with Modern Nerves” (Der Mensch mit den modernen Nerven), which premiered at Cannes in 1989. Then came “The Air by Attwenger” (Attwengers Luft, 1995, three minutes; premiere at the Locarno festival in 1996) and “Mécanomagie” (1996, sixteen minutes; Rotterdam, 1997).
In 2003 the Cannes festival showed “In the Beginning Was the Eye” (Im Anfang war der Blick), forty-five minutes long. A series of short pieces followed: “La Belle est la Bête” (2005) and “Roll over Mozart” (2006, one minute) both played in Rotterdam. After them came “Being and Nothingness” (Das Sein und das Nichts, 2007, ten minutes) and “Free Radicals”, a ninety-minute film made with Bernhard Zachhuber, which was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2007. For “Being and Nothingness” the sources give different places of premiere: Venice and Rotterdam. In 2008 the eight-minute “Seems to Be” (Schein Sein) was shown at the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival. In 2017 “MappaMundi”, forty-five minutes long, was presented at the Sundance Film Festival. Minck’s work has been screened at film festivals in Toronto and Rotterdam and in museums, among them the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
In parallel she worked as a producer. Minck is one of the founders of the companies Amour Fou Vienna and Amour Fou Luxembourg. Her production credits include “Amour Fou” (2014, directed by Jessica Hausner), “Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden” (2016, Dieter Berner), “The Night of 1000 Hours” (2016, Virgil Widrich), “Styx” (2018, a co-production; premiere at the Berlinale) and, in 2023, “Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey into the Desert” by Margarethe von Trotta. For her work as a producer of feature films she received the Austrian Romy award, given for film and television, in 2017.
In 2009 Minck sat on the jury of the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival. In 2026 she was admitted to the German Film Academy. She lives and works in Vienna and Luxembourg.
Profile notes