The Jury’s Report from the Wiesbaden Board of Film Classification (FBW) (4 March 2011)
Inge Brandenburg was an exceptional artiste, and in this film she receives a wonderful tribute. […] Marc Boettcher paints a meticulously detailed portrait of her career, with its handful of highs and its many lows. Particularly impressive is the care he reveals in his choice not only of the documents that he uses but also of the archival material and eyewitness accounts that feature in the film.
At the same time Inge Brandenburg’s life serves as the starting point for a cultural history of popular music in post-war Germany, and here the lack of interest in good-quality jazz and the constant blandishments of the commercial market provide two of the film’s recurrent themes. But we also follow the tragic story of an extremely complex and contradictory woman who stood up for her own particular brand of music in such an uncompromising way that she was bound in the end to fail – and not just commercially. In spite of this, the film is not depressing, for time and again we see and hear Inge Brandenburg singing jazz, which she does with such an intense pleasure in her own performances that one can sense that at least on those occasions when she had a microphone in front of her, she must have been happy as a person.