On set they call me Kuchenopa — cake grandpa. I believe good coffee and good cake aren't perks, they're infrastructure. A calm set makes better work than a stressed one, and nothing resets a crew faster than someone who shows up with Bienenstich.

I'm a Berlin-based director. I studied art for two and a half years before deciding I'd rather make the work than talk about it. Photography came first, then cinematography, then directing — which is to say I make fashion films, commercials, music videos, and the occasional thing nobody asked for.

Most of this job is prep and post: treatments, decks, the long argument about color temperature. The visible one percent — the part people think is the whole job — only works because of the ninety-nine they don't see.

One of those "nobody asked for" projects was African Face, Colonial Tongue, made with Serati Maseko, a South African artivist raised across three continents. It's built from her essay on the tension between her African heritage and the colonial language that shapes thought. It won Berlin Short Film Festival 2026 and was nominated at the 1.4 Awards and in Toronto.

I can draw storyboards by hand and go deep into the technical when it earns its place — Gaussian splatting, Unreal Engine, virtual production. At one point I had a full camera-tracking rig in my living room. The tools change. The point doesn't: build the frame that makes people feel something, and hide the work that got it there.