Wieland Schulz-Keil

Wieland Schulz-Keil studied literature and philosophy at the universities of Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Berlin. During these years, he began directing plays at various theaters in Europe. In 1967 he became a contributing editor to Theater Heute, Germany's leading theater magazine. Invited by the Chelsea Theater Center in New York to direct plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1969, Schulz-Keil took up residence in New York City, and in 1970 formed a documentary film production company, WSK Productions. During the next ten years he wrote, directed and produced over forty docu-mentaries for the BBC and PBS, as well as for German and Japanese TV. His better known documentaries include 'The New Deal For Artists', a 4-hour series on the cultural politics of the Roosevelt administration; 'German Film Emigration', a 7-hour series on filmmakers who left Germany during the Hitler years; and 'Shamans In The Blind Country', about a tribe in Nepal, shot over three years in the Himalayan mountains. Schulz-Keil published numerous essays on culture and the arts, organized art exhibitions, and in 1975 formed a book publishing firm in New York, Urizen Books, remaining a publisher until it was sold in 1983. In 1981 he worked with Guy Gallo and John Huston on the screenplay for Under the Volcano (1984) and went on to produce the picture, together with his old friend Moritz Borman. Since then Schulz-Keil has been producing theatrical motion pictures in the USA, in France and in the UK, one of the latest of which was The Cat's Meow (2001). In recent years Wieland Schulz-Keil, together with long-time associate Philipp Kreuzer, arranged the financing of a number of important motion pictures, among them: Enemy at the Gates (2001), _ Score,The (2001)_, Serving Sara (2002), and Beyond Borders (2003). Wieland Schulz-Keil has played a decisive role in the development of a Europe-wide digital cinema. He has participated in numerous European and international symposiums, including the Montreux-Symposium where he served as co-chairman of the "Digital Cinema" forum.