Anja Giele is a director currently based in southern Germany, where she is completing her studies in Directing for Advertising at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

Born in 1998 in Taiwan, she grew up between Germany, the US, and Taiwan, moving six times before the age of 16. This multicultural upbringing shaped her creative vision and continues to inspire her work.

Starting out as a camera assistant and later working in various production roles, Anja developed a passion for directing.

Her film WHAT WAS I MADE FOR has already received significant recognition, including: Young Directors Award (GOLD) , AICP (GOLD) , 2 x ADC (GOLD), CLIO (SILVER) & DWP (Best Young Talent Commercial)

I began as a camera assistant because my interest in film started through photography. Images have always given me a lot — I felt I could express myself through them, and they reflected my emotional state back to me, sometimes in ways I wasn’t even aware of. That fascinated me.

I also loved the idea of becoming a “tech nerd,” especially in a field still dominated by men. I enjoyed it when people (usually men) assumed I didn’t know what I was doing because of my gender or appearance — and then proving them wrong, even if I was wearing a skirt.

I’d still happily work as an AC sometimes, without the creative pressure on set. But after a few student projects where I did the camera, I realised I was often thinking more like a director. I also noticed that others wanted to be a DoP much more intensely than I did.

Directing came quite naturally once I realised that I find it fulfilling to “curate” many departments and stay with a project from start to finish, rather than jumping from one shoot to the next.

It’s not necessarily about the diversity of perspectives — those are probably internalised anyway — but more about the search for connection. Real, genuine connection: with people, with stories, with yourself, with cultures. I think that’s what life is about.

When you move around a lot as a child, meeting so many people, cultures, and ways of communicating, you’re forced to get creative. You learn how to build receivers and transmitters so others can understand you. It’s a bit like being a satellite, constantly adapting to the cultural signals people bring with them, and how they connect with each other.

The best part is when you succeed in building that connection — you feel warm and in tune. Creativity lets me use more playful, unusual ways to connect. What began as a survival strategy became the engine for my passion.

From the very first minute, I was obsessed with this world — an exaggerated portrayal of our own Western society. I’m tired of constant calls for self-improvement (“even perfect isn’t perfect enough”) and fascinated by the idea of a bright, silicone world made of plastic and toxic substances, where vegetables want to become “extra healthy.”

Veggie-Ville is a low-key parody of today’s performance-driven consumer culture, obsessed with body aesthetics and fitness. Only the prettiest, crunchiest vegetables make it into the “holy” supermarket. Few people question what that place is actually supposed to be, or how rewarding it really is. The promises are so powerful they become like a religion. Nobody seems to notice the dull, unpleasant world behind the billboards — a world that only becomes bleaker if everyone is fixated on self-optimisation instead of creating a sustainable way of living together.

During research, I learned that supermarkets and food processors literally have measurement charts, down to the millimetre, for what vegetables must look like. Produce that’s perfectly edible gets thrown away because it’s too small or oddly shaped. In our age of resource scarcity, that’s absurd — though sadly not surprising. So the idea of vegetables training for the perfect measurements isn’t all that far-fetched.

Advertising became the easiest way to show this world, because it reflects a culture’s dreams and fears faster than most media or art forms. Designing the ads in Veggie-Ville was almost the most fun part for me — you can learn so much about a society from its advertising.

Once the second script version was ready and production was moving, I sat down with our character artist, Marie Katharina Römer. She designed Stevie first, then the other main characters. We tried out different faces and bodies, meeting a few times until we found the final designs. Arne and I then replicated them exactly in 3D for the puppet builds.

Like many things in student films… you can’t find someone else to do it, so you end up doing it yourself, learning as you go, and powering through. I’ve always enjoyed making things with my hands, so puppet building was actually one of my favourite parts of the project — though I never could have done it without Arne Hain, a stop-motion legend. He built Stevie’s body, and together we finished Stevie with silicone and wire.

Arne didn’t have time to make the other two figures unpaid, so I took over. I was often frustrated, but usually found a way through. The worst part was having to repair the puppets every night during the shoot. They kept breaking, and because everything needed to stay movable, I couldn’t just glue things like I could with the set. I had to repaint eyelids daily, produce replacement mouths on a sort of assembly line… That part was hell. I really wished I hadn’t been alone with it.

So many! We got permission from Steve Küster to use his CT and MRI scans of vegetables and fruits. Our set designers, Nele and Mareike, printed them on special film and backlit them in the doctor’s office set, so they look like vegetable X-rays.

All the ads placed throughout the film are full of humour — there’s even a “Nice here, but have you ever been to Baden-Württemberg?” sticker. On the street, above one of the shops Stevie passes, there are wire pigeon spikes with a bit of bird mess and wind-blown trash.

We made miniature cling film packs for a fictional product promising to “keep you fresh and young,” a pesticide shake in the gym, and a nutrition facts table there as well. The list goes on and on. It’s a little sad that all this fine detail gets lost in such a short format — but we took photos of everything!