Biography

As the son of a Lufthansa manager, Henckel von Donnersmarck spent his childhood and school years in New York, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Brussels, where he passed his international high school diploma in 1991. He then spent two years studying in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) with the following job as a Russian teacher. From 1993 to 1996 he studied PPE philosophy, political science and economics at New College, Oxford. In 1996 he completed a directing internship with Richard Attenborough. In 1997 he began studying feature film directing at the University of Television and Film in Munich. The four-minute short film "Dobermann" was made in 1999, for which he also wrote the book. The work received the rating "Particularly Valuable" and became part of the "Next Generation Role" of "German Cinema in Cannes". At the same time, the work marked his national breakthrough with numerous awards, including the Max Ophüls Prize in 2000.

This was followed by a commissioned work for Universal and Gaumont TV, "Les Mythes Urbains" from 2001. In 2002, he directed the short film "The Templar" in collaboration with producers Max Wiedemann and Quirin Berg. Awarded as "particularly valuable", the five-minute film was shown as part of the Hof Film Festival. The work was awarded, among other things, the Eastman Prize and the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Prize in 2003. Henckel von Donnersmarck became a German star of international cinema with his first feature film "The Lives of Others". In 2006 he was awarded the "Bavarian Film Prize", the "European Film Prize", the "Peace Prize for German Film", the "Quadriga Prize" and a nomination for the "Golden Globe".

On February 25, 2007, "The Lives of Others" was awarded the "Oscar" for "Best Foreign Language Film" at the 79th Academy Awards in Los Angeles, which also marked his international breakthrough as a filmmaker. In 2010 he directed his second feature film, the romantic thriller "The Tourist", starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp.

In his private life, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is married to the lawyer Christiane Asschenfeldt and is the father of two children.
- IMDb mini biography by: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth

What makes film so much better than video is that film seems slightly surreal - for example, red on film is a chemical reproduction of red, and therefore has its own strange beauty. If you go anamorphic, it's almost like taking that effect to the power of two.

Super 35mm is a process I'd never use, because there's something almost karmically wrong with throwing away such a large part of the negative. I actually did my thesis about the differences between Super 35 and CinemaScope, because it left me no peace that James Cameron always uses Super 35. I found out, of course, that in purely mathematical terms, Super 35 is a lot better than 'Scope, but that's the great thing - video might at some point be mathematically much better than film, but film will still be more beautiful. It's not about objectivity, it's about art, and with anamorphic, you're really using the magic of cinema.