Fräulein Talents: Sheri Hagen

Not at all. Actually, it still feels kind of absurd to me that I’m doing all of those things.

I was just talking about this recently with a friend I know from my musical theatre days in Vienna. We randomly ran into each other at an event without knowing the other would be there. And she said, “Look at you, look at us, where we are now.” If someone had told us back then that this would be the path we’d take, I never would have believed it. I would have laughed.

And the fact that I can now call myself an author and filmmaker? I never would have imagined that either.

I actually started out in musical theatre quite naïvely, and I sort of entered my other fields out of necessity, because I really wanted to tell my own stories. Stories I wanted people to see. Stories about the people I see out on the streets. Stories that affect me, stories I myself would buy a ticket for.

I started in musical theatre, and musical theatre seems more diverse, but it actually isn’t. Not really, if you look closely. Because what’s interesting is: whose perspective is actually being told?

I came to acting through musical theatre because at some point I got tired of always being this sort of decoration that gets moved around from one place to another. So I switched to acting because I assumed it would be more diverse, more layered, more multifaceted.

Until I realized I was hitting limits there too, because invisibility plays a huge role there as well.

The people I naturally see in everyday life—whether in Berlin, at the North Sea, or in smaller towns, not just big cities like Hamburg, Berlin, or Frankfurt—our reality is diverse. But what we see on screen is still relatively one-dimensional, very much stuck in one lane.

And it’s always being told for a particular audience.

That’s what I wanted to break with in my stories.

I used to complain a lot as an actress—that the right stories didn’t exist, the right roles didn’t exist, that there weren’t opportunities to really show yourself or grow.

And friends of mine said, “Then just do it yourself.”

That was probably the most important sentence anyone ever said to me.

Because I thought, okay, they’re right. Instead of complaining, I’ll act. I’ll make it myself.

And that’s how I came to filmmaking, to storytelling.

And I still love it. I still enjoy it. And I wish we were given even more space to simply be allowed to tell more stories.

I usually say Billie is an act of empowerment by women, for women. That’s really what it is.

To put it very plainly: it’s the story of two women who end up trapped inside a bank because of 300 euros and are mistakenly perceived as bank robbers.

And only through solidarity with one another do they manage to free themselves from the situation.

It’s about self-liberation. It’s about solidarity, empathy, and standing together.

That’s why it was important for me to tell this story.

But it’s also about domestic violence.

A form of violence that so often happens in the dark, so to speak.

Thanks to the MeToo movement, more women are daring to act, to speak louder, to speak out, to respond. So it has received more visibility now, I would say.

But not nearly enough, because of the structural powerlessness built into our system.

And I wanted to tell this story because 10 or 15 years ago, I realized that basically every woman around me had experienced some form of partner violence, more or less. In different forms, different manifestations.

And that shocked me.

I thought: how can it be that all of my friends, or women I know, have experienced relationship violence in one form or another?

And yet it still remains so underexposed.

That’s what I wanted to tell a story about.

But I didn’t want to make a classic drama.

Humor is important to me, because I think humor gives us a chance to exhale. To let heavy themes settle. To reflect.

So I wanted to combine the difficult subject of domestic violence with humor.

And that became Billie.

That’s life, isn’t it?

My own life, my private life. It’s not only about pain and drama. There is lightness, too. Humour. Laughter. Absurd things happen as well.

And if you really pay attention to what happens to you in everyday life, and later look back on it, you sometimes end up laughing at things that once felt deeply existential and incredibly painful.

Later, you can laugh about them because you tell the story differently, because you can look at them from another perspective.

But that doesn’t mean the pain disappears.

I think what worked here in Billie is that I really leaned into those absurdities.

In some places, I deliberately heightened them, consciously played with exaggeration, but always alongside a point of deep emotional pain, because that mattered to me.

I always wanted that sense of lightness to exist alongside the pain.

That’s why I split that dynamic between my two main characters, Nina and Angie.

One carries more of the drama, the other more of the comedy and absurdity.

And in the end, the two come together.

That’s how I’d say I managed it.

Yes, absolutely.

I spoke with women who were affected, women carrying different kinds of trauma.

Because I think all of us are traumatized in one way or another. Some people are simply better at coping with it than others. For some, it’s more visible, for others, less so. And we’ve also learned to hide certain things.

But I also worked with the Berlin Initiative Against Violence Toward Women. It’s a small civil society organization in Berlin that does very committed work against violence against women.

They were incredible.

They also reviewed my scripts. That was important to me, that people who had experienced these things, if they went to see the film, would feel addressed and represented. That it wouldn’t feel as though I were telling a story over their heads or bypassing their pain.

That mattered a great deal to me.

I wanted an organization like that, one that works with these women every single day, protects them, takes them in, and empowers them. I wanted them to point out anything that didn’t ring true or where I needed to make changes.

Well, Billie doesn’t deal only with domestic violence. I work with simultaneity, because intersectionality is incredibly important to me.

We’re all human beings. We contain many things at once. And I can’t separate that in my storytelling.

Just as I’m perceived as Black, older now, and female—those three visible aspects existing within me—I also wanted to show a cross-section of society in Billie, in order to explore all these different power structures that people are read through.

And how different forms of violence interact with one another, sometimes reinforcing each other.

But also how there are possibilities to break those forms of violence.

So in that sense, I was able to protect myself by moving between different planes—between different forms of oppression, different perspectives.

That allowed me to let go of one painful point for a moment in order to look at another, whether age, gender, or other marginalized groups who also appear in Billie.

And then also through humor. For me, humor is so important.

I think humor is my life raft.

Humor and hope.

Otherwise, I don’t think I could bear this life, or everything that’s happening in the world right now.

What I’d really wish for is not just coexistence, but solidarity.

That’s what I feel is deeply missing.

And I would wish for less fear.

And, specifically when it comes to politics, I would of course want concrete measures to address the inequality that exists in our society.

That’s what I would hope for.

For example—just to name something specific—the investment obligation.

I would want an investment quota tied to a diversity quota, in order to deliberately give underrepresented people the chance to grow, just as much as others have always been allowed to grow.

We should be allowed to fail just as much.

We should be allowed to grow just as much.

We should be allowed to be just as creative.

That’s what I would wish for.

So: less fear, more courage, and concrete action—immediately.

Yes.

My production company also emerged out of necessity.

At the time, I couldn’t find a producer for my stories.

And instead of giving up, I said: Alright, then I’ll produce my own stories myself.

That’s how it happened.

But also, of course, because I want to create opportunities for other creatives as well, to help bring their stories to life.

There are so many wonderful stories that never get the chance they deserve, stories that still can’t make it through the door, even when that door is slightly open.

And I want to help strengthen that.

I would love for us to become broader, bolder in the stories we tell, and not keep focusing on one singular storytelling perspective, but instead widen that perspective.

I think the most important thing I would want to pass on is courage.

The courage to speak.

The courage to cry out.

To not let anyone take your voice away.

That feels incredibly important to me.

That’s what I would want to say.

Go out.

Find your people.

Connect with each other.

Be creative.