Vanessa Nica Mueller is an independent filmmaker, with German and East African heritage. She works as a film director, editor, and producer in Hamburg. In her films she deals with questions of memory, the human being in relation to urban space and nature, the uncanny and the cinematic construction of inner states, as well as the tension between familiarity and alienation, identity and attributions. She creates films that always contain an openness at the interface between staging and observation. She focuses on an essayistic and associative narrative style and combines digital material with analog footage. Her short films have been screened at renowned film festivals and were also presented in the context of art exhibitions. She studied film and time-based media. She intermittently works as a lecturer in the field of film education or curates film programs. Her film “Landen” (2023) is her first feature-length film.