The festival was held at , just south of , where underwater scenes were filmed in 1953.
The following year she visited New York City with her aunt and posed for pictures with a professional photographic studio; one of her photos was sold to Emerson Televisions for use in commercial advertising, and it became a widely-used promotional piece, printed in national magazines for several years thereafter.
Her grandmother is actress Eva-Maria Hagen, and her step-grandfather is the East German dissident writer Wolf Biermann.