Albertine Code is the Chicago-based film studio and publishing imprint of Kerstin Schaars.
Kerstin Schaars is an artist and filmmaker with a background in literature.
Heavily influenced by the camera trickery of early movie-masters such as Alice Guy and Buster Keaton, Kerstin uses cinema as a means to address the ambiguous tension between delight and melancholy, or magic and reality. She travels extensively to shoot very ordinary things. She has collaborated with metal-smiths, weavers, clothing designers, honey vendors, musicians and visual artists to create site-specific installations. She builds her own movie sets and often employs her children as actors, cinematographers and sketch artists. In 2025 She launched Albertine Code Books, a publishing imprint devoted to the modest elegance of paperback books.
Kerstin began as a reader.
At the age of 19 Kerstin worked in a Paris-based gallery with a German client base and she speaks no German. She worked less than a week in a Paris hotel, exiting in part because the American guests were enormously disappointed when greeted in American-English. She worked as a literature lecturer. She worked for the legal team at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. She founded and shuttered a publishing imprint named after her two grandmothers, Harriet and Leone.
Kerstin found apprenticeship wherever she went. She learned how to cook a standing rib roast in the galley of a T.W.A. airliner flying over the Atlantic from her mother who did just that. She learned how to stretch meals with starch from grandmothers, one of whom was her own. She learned how to bring people together over food and help them forget and discover new versions of themselves.