Andrea Luka Zimmerman: “The 90s were amazing, but the brutal violence was real”

Andrea Luka Zimmerman arrived in London from Munich in 1991, entering a city where identities, cultures and subcultures constantly intersected. While living and studying at Central Saint Martins throughout the analogue, improvised 1990s, they witnessed not only the decade’s creative energy but also the city’s inequalities, urban shifts and early waves of gentrification. Rather than engaging with the institutional structures and art‑market machinery driving the high‑profile YBA era, Zimmerman charted an independent path, developing work rooted in different communities and commitments.

In 2001 they co-founded Vision Machine, a collective with Christine Cynn, Joshua Oppenheimer and Michael Uwemedimo, later contributing to the Oscar-nominated The Look of Silence (2014). Zimmerman went on to found Fugitive Images in 2009, producing socially engaged projects. Their films confront the erasure of working-class London (Estate, a Reverie, 2015), centre communities at the margins (Taskafa: Stories of the Street, 2013), and foreground collaborative authorship and social realities (Here for Life, 2019).

Zimmerman’s latest film, While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child, is an intimately reflective story about their transition from child to young adult, coloured by generational trauma. By combining personal photos and videos from Germany, London and the 1990s cultural landscape, the film’s limbo-like editing creates an inward yet outward facing look at the psychological thresholds that shaped a filmmaker, artist and social activist.

It has its world premiere at the opening of this year’s London Short Film Festival, where it screens alongside new work from John Smith, Ché Scott-Heron Newton and more, as part of a programme spotlighting personal stories.

Georgia Korossi: What it’s like to have your film on the opening night of LSFF?

Andrea Luka Zimmerman: It is very special, because the conversations that will follow – also from the other films in the programme about people’s lives – will enrich audiences. Also, John Smith is my film tutor and a good friend who was crucial in my development – helping me make sense of art, self-made practice, theory, rebellious social and political approaches, and the importance of playfulness, which I never forget. To be with him in the screening with his film Being John Smith, and then mine ending the programme, is an honour.

How does it feel to see audiences engaging with something so intimate to you?

Zimmerman: Once I make a film, I must let it go and allow it to spark conversation, critique, or whatever responses people bring to it. Showing it to my students and to others was incredibly enriching, and I’m aware that public-facing discussions may bring a range of reactions, especially around survivorhood and visibility. For me, though, it’s not about self-presentation but about resisting the individualisation that shapes so much of our culture.

What I really want to explore is how we relate to our own archives. Like [artist] Michelle Citron questioning why she looked so happy in her home movies, I find myself asking where the evidence of history truly lies. Cinema has taught us what misery, abuse and perpetrators look like – always villains. But in reality, they look like ordinary people. I wanted to play with those tropes, shaped as I was by home cinema and party films. Alongside this is a deeper conversation about what happens when we grow up without love, with neglect, and how we hold space for suffering in a society where therapy and care are often inaccessible.

What shaped the formal and stylistic choices that you made?

Zimmerman: I wanted to navigate my archive for this film because I had all these photographs and videos. I layered the materials in a way that is partly chronological, but memory doesn’t work on that logic. So, I jump back and forth in different strands. There are so many threads.

The way the image and audio interact crosses over like a series of questions, and as it moves through me – echoing out and calling back – in that exchange you, the audience, find your agency. I hope you make up your own mind, not just about what I’m saying but about the ongoing in relation to what you see, that moment of “I never thought about this.” That moment that opens up a little doubt, and then the audience says, “I remember this.”

What was arriving in 90s London to study like for you?

Zimmerman: I started out as a hairdresser, but I always knew I wanted to make films. There was no internet then, not in the way we have it now, so I relied on magazines like Loot to find opportunities. After hearing about an access course in Tower Hamlets, I borrowed a camera to make a quick portfolio, improvised the interview, and was rejected because the course was full. Then a couple of days later they called to offer me a place, and getting in completely changed my life thanks to tutors who taught me everything and created a space where I could grow.

In my programme we were a group from all over the world, and we were reading thinkers like Frantz Fanon. From day one, I joined the anti-fascist demonstrations; they were full of young people. It felt politicised, even before I understood what that meant. The 90s were amazing, but the brutal violence was real. There was so much racism. Before the Blue Note [music club in Hoxton Square], it was dangerous to go down to Hoxton at night when you were a person of colour.

That early political grounding made it impossible later to accept a world driven by profit, individual gain and the idea that success comes from taking from others. Coming from a background with no money – when places like Shoreditch were still affordable – I grew into a kind of instinctive socialist, surviving on student support and unpaid work, and seeing art not as a neoliberal product but as a privilege shaped by collective, compassionate, non-mainstream structures.

How do you see this film sitting within your broader political and artistic practice?

Zimmerman: I think this is deeply political because I’m using myself to speak about taboo subjects such as family estrangement and intergenerational trauma. We don’t often talk about these unless it’s in the trauma narrative. What does gaslighting actually look like? I’m showing what I feel, so I’m making a very conscious, definitive decision to use my life and my mother’s life to say no to a world that repeats this over. But also, it works as a film that shows extreme sadness, vulnerability and melancholy, as well as playfulness and survival.

In my films I create spaces for people who are usually marginalised or spoken about in limiting ways, and I use myself in that same framework. I grew up being told that leaving school at 13 or 16 meant you were destined to become a criminal or a failure. Then, if you become something else, people say, “You did so well, you made it.” It’s like a binary society. But lots of lives are much more enmeshed in each other. We need each other, right?

The London Short Film Festival runs from 23 January to 1 February 2026.