Ulrike's Brain

Ulrike's Brain is a 2017 German-Canadian drama film directed by Bruce LaBruce. It was screened in the Forum section at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival.[1]

The film, described by LaBruce in advance interviews as a sequel of sorts to his early film The Raspberry Reich,[2] stars Susanne Sachsse as Julia Feifer, an academic who possesses and can communicate with the brain of German Red Army Faction radical Ulrike Meinhof.[1] She is seeking to transplant the brain into a new body so that she can resurrect Meinhof and revive her goal of socialist and feminist revolution, but her plans are complicated when her archrival Detlev Schlesinger, an extreme right-wing ideologue, arrives with identical plans for the surviving brain of German neo-Nazi leader Michael Kühnen.[1]

The film, a spoof of the 1960s B-movie subgenre of mad scientists preserving human brains, is thematically linked with LaBruce's feature film The Misandrists, which premiered at Berlin's Panorama program in the same week.[3] Although both films were made in Germany, Ulrike's Brain received some production funding from the Canada Council for the Arts while The Misandrists did not.