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Ulrike Ottinger (born 6 June 1942) is a German filmmaker and photographer.
From 1962 to 1968, Ottinger worked as a freelance artist in Paris and studied etching with Johnny Friedlaender among other studies. They participated in several exhibitions.
In 1966 she wrote her first screenplay, entitled Die Mongolische Doppelschublade.
Ottinger returned to West Germany in 1969 and, in cooperation with the Film Seminar at the University of Konstanz, founded the film club "Visuell", which she directed until 1972. She also headed a gallery and the associated "galeriepress”, where they edited works by contemporary artists.
During this time she met Tabea Blumenschein and , both of whom have been cast as lead actresses in her films since 1972. Ottinger developed her own bizarre surrealist film-style which, among other things, was marked by widespread abandonment of a linear plot and instead linger long in individual scenes of a mostly female cast in überstarke and extravagant costumes of the imagination artfully designed as collages.
She directed and did stage design for Elfriede Jelinek's Clara S. at the Württembergisches Staatstheater in Stuttgart in 1983, and did the same for Jelinek's Begierde und Fahrerlaubnis in Graz in 1986. In 1989, her film Joan of Arc of Mongolia, with Delphine Seyrig who acted in many of her films, was entered into the 39th Berlin International Film Festival.
In 2003, Ottinger was selected for a solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. Titled South East Passage, the work "is in three chapters - a travelogue of the artist's journey from southeast Poland to the Bulgarian shores of the Black Sea and a portrait of two coastal cities, Odessa and Istanbul". South East Passage was the first of a two-part series of exhibits exploring Eastern European video work. Ulrike Ottinger at the Renaissance Society
On the occasion of the 2009 New York premiere of The Korean Wedding Chest, with Ottinger to be in attendance, The New York Times characterized the director as, "during the 1980s heyday of the New German Cinema, having constituted a one-woman avant-garde opposition to the sulky male melodramas of Wim Wenders, Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, her films being long, discursive, and wildly inventive." "Undiscovered Countries: The Films of Ulrike Ottinger" by Dave Kehr, subsection of "Film Series and Movie Listings," The New York Times, October 8, 2009. Retrieved Oct. 17, 2009.
Ottinger's films, with their visible preference for Far Eastern formal language, turned in the following decades to some unconventional documentaries about life in various Asian regions.
Ottinger's horror-drama film The Blood Countess, based on Elizabeth Báthory, a 16th-century Hungarian serial killer, was in development for over a decade since at least 2010 THE BLOOD COUNTESS (in preparation) Tilda Swinton Latest to Bathe with The Blood Countess before finally entering production in 2025. "Isabelle Huppert Vampire Movie ‘The Blood Countess’ Boarded by Magnify Ahead of EFM Launch" by Elsa Keslassy, Variety, February 4, 2025. Retrieved September 26, 2025. Directed by Ottinger and co-written with Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize winning author of The Piano Teacher, the film stars in the title role Isabelle Huppert, who had also played lead in the 2001 film version of The Piano Teacher.
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