It was late afternoon in the early 1990s, at the BBC bureau in eastern Berlin. I was enjoying an unusually quiet day as the BBC’s German business correspondent, leafing through the day’s newspapers.
Suddenly, the door burst open, and a dark-haired Englishwoman of roughly my own age rushed in, white-faced and screaming in agony.
“I’ve been bitten by a dog!” she cried, with no further introduction. “I need medical help – now!”
I sat her down on the improbably carmine-red leather sofa the office had inherited from its previous occupants, and fetched the first-aid kit, suggesting we take her jeans off to check and clean the wound with antiseptic. There was no blood seeping through, which was a good sign, though the woman was clearly in shock.
When the jeans came off, there was no bite. Not even a nip. Not even a hint of a small nibble. No indentations whatsoever. The woman looked down, almost as bemused as I was. “But it was a huge Alsatian, and it lunged at me!”
I made her a cup of tea, and we introduced ourselves. Henrietta Foster told me she was in Berlin making an arts film for Newsnight and had been reconnoitring a nearby WWII bomb site-turned-building site to use as an interview backdrop for a film about the German queer cinema director Rosa von Praunheim.
She’d climbed over a wire fence to get in, not realising there was a guard-dog on site, which had howled at her and promptly chased her up the fence as she struggled to get out again, gnashing at her shins as she managed to clamber back up and over to safety.
After an hour or so, a rather calmer Henrietta left, and I went back to my newspapers.
The next day, around the same time, she returned with an air of steely determination.
“You speak German, don’t you?” she asked. “I need someone to come with me to the Bunker fetish club around the corner tonight, to make sure we get in, because I want to recce that as the main interview location for Rosa.”
How could I possibly refuse this intriguing request from a BBC producer who was quite obviously unhinged?
By midnight, we finally found ourselves at the front of the long queue to get in, before hitting an unexpected snag. Henrietta was wearing a Laura Ashley-style skirt and white blouse, suitable for daytime filming recces, but not at all the thing for a late-night Berlin fetish club.
My black leather jacket and boots apparently qualified me for entry, but the bald, thickset Berlin bouncer was not about to let a sprigged poplin skirt pass through his cordon. Henrietta explained that she was from the BBC, but that didn’t have much effect.
“So what can I do?” she asked the uncooperative chap. “Well, you could just take the offending skirt and blouse off,” he suggested, with a triumphant smirk.
I was already turning to leave when I realised that Henrietta was taking off her skirt and blouse, popping them calmly into her capacious bag, and smiling at the bouncer in an equally challenging way while stripping down to nothing but her underwear and shoes.
The bouncer, who knew when he was beaten, grudgingly held aside the entry rope for us, his posture suggesting this was a rare defeat.
Several hours later, Henrietta deemed the night an enormous success, the Bunker the perfect location for Rosa, as we pushed our way out of the club through a mass of heaving, sweaty bodies, and back into the cool Berlin night air.
I never did see the finished film, but I’m sure it was superlative. Anyone willing to strip to their Marks & Spencer undies for a BBC recce at a Berlin S&M club was a woman who cared about every detail of her work to an unusual degree. A woman not to be trifled with.
We kept in touch over the years, meeting for coffee and a gossip about the BBC and the state of the world whenever I was back in London, or Henrietta was in Berlin, and later when I was based in Moscow and Paris.
Henrietta often fired off emails asking about that nation’s current politics, feminism, art scene, and cinema, along with a blizzard of suggestions of stories I should be looking into. And then one day she sent me an email asking whether we should work together on some films for Newsnight. I had the sense that I’d been auditioned for some time — and had finally passed.
That was the start of several years of happy collaboration across many countries on the 10–12-minute films that the old Newsnight specialised in, and I discovered for myself the tenacity, thought, and care that Henrietta put into every film she made. Her subversive sense of humour was another glorious revelation, as we spent more time together.
We followed Angela Merkel on the election trail in 2005, with our German cameraman willing but clearly unused to the 14-hour days that Henrietta expected from a Newsnight crew. He was also unaccustomed to working with a producer who had very precise ideas of the shots she wanted, and the effects and motifs that would make up the mood of the film: Golden hour shots of a German political rally against a sunset, tight close-ups of faces, adding up to a portrait of a nation that took its politics seriously and wanted to get this election right. It became a film that scrutinised one country and its two peoples as it emerged from decades of Cold War division, seeking a way to heal those deep-seated wounds.
We filmed rally after rally across east and west, with Merkel never really managing to rouse the crowds with her oratory (“Probably quite a good thing in Germany,” noted Henrietta drily) and spent two days trying to doorstep Frau Merkel at her Spree-side home, only managing to meet her rather cross husband who told us to bugger off before he called the police.
Gerhard Schröder was far chattier, happy to be door-stepped after a lengthy rally at Gendarmenmarkt square that ran late into the night, his brief interview a masterclass in charm and political seduction. His speeches roused and exhilarated his supporters, yet he ultimately lost the Chancellorship.
We visited the place where Merkel had grown up, learning from her old friends and neighbours about how Helmut Kohl’s ‘Mädchen’ had managed to survive the decades under Communist dictatorship by choosing a career in science, as unpolitical as it was possible to be in a society in which the personal was political. And in the brief moments of rest as the filming progressed, Henrietta and I sat over many a Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake), talking about what we hoped for from life and work.
Gradually, I learned more about Henrietta’s beloved family, her adoration of and fierce loyalty to her siblings, and her passion for music and all the arts. I discovered that she’d survived cancer as a young woman and battled her way back to health. From the start of our friendship and working relationship, I had no doubt about her bravery and refusal ever to take the easy path – except perhaps when fleeing an angry Alsatian guard-dog.
She also made me laugh uproariously throughout the long days and nights on the road, as I learned to decipher her entire alphabet of expressive eye-rolls on days when things were not going as well as hoped.
Henrietta’s mordant humour was often deployed when the camera-person’s blood sugar was running low, and she’d silently return to hand over a sugary cake, or when political press secretaries were playing up on timings, and she’d summon up huge reserves of charm and puppy-dog eyes that successfully begged for just another half hour or so of filming.
Her gentlest side came to the fore when we filmed a Newsnight together in the early 2000s in France with Denise Epstein, the daughter of Irene Nemirovsky, the Ukrainian-born French novelist who wrote Suite Francaise, a haunting book written while the author hid from Nazi occupation before she was arrested and murdered at Auschwitz.
It was a film only Henrietta could have made, as we sought to examine how France had dealt with its Vichy-era past and how the ripples of that past still surfaced with tension just below the surface of the modern-day Republic.
In 2007, we were back to politics – this time following Ségolène Royal across a mammoth election campaign in France, before she ultimately lost to Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round. Henrietta rescued me after Sarkozy’s security men picked me up by my shoulders and carried me out of his path to stop me door-stepping him as he emerged from a rally.
His press officer had refused our earlier interview request, asking us why Sarko should waste his time on “no-votes British TV”. In fluent and rapid-fire French, Henrietta left him in no doubt that he had made a completely wrong decision, and if Sarkozy were to lose, he should not try to blame the BBC.
Her deep knowledge of and passion for French history and culture shone through, and I learned far more from her than she ever did from me.
The film Henrietta made from our week or so on the road with Royal surpassed all my expectations, ending up as a lyrical examination of a country at a crossroads, and a portrait of a female candidate battling her way through a hostile, deeply male political environment, ultimately unable to persuade the French electorate that it was ready for a real-life Marianne in charge.
In the BBC Paris edit suite, we discussed and debated every line of script, every sequence and how it should build to a crescendo and its final coda. Henrietta’s knowledge of music added another layer of meaning, along with a motif of a clear, running stream we’d filmed just outside a campaign rally in the countryside, which perhaps symbolised the renewal of the stagnant body politic that Ségolène Royal was trying, but failing, to bring about.
This afternoon in Bloomsbury – Henrietta’s natural spiritual habitat, I always felt – I passed the café in Lincoln’s Inn Fields where we last sat down for a coffee and a catch-up as she was on her way to a concert nearby.
By then, Henrietta was thin, pale and clearly ill, yet unbowed. Her sharp, questioning intellect was absolutely intact, as was her dark humour, even as her body weakened. Henrietta Insoumise, as she always was, walking her own path.
Henrietta would have adored seeing the little white cherry tree in full bloom this spring, its fragile blossom quickened by the wind. It feels quite impossible that she’s gone.
Photograph courtesy of Jean-Pierre Dalbera. Published under a Creative Commons license.
