On set they call me Kuchenopa. Cake grandpa. Because 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 at art school for two and a half years, then quit. I don't regret it. I think.

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.

99% of this job is prep and post: emails, treatments, decks, arguing about color temperature in way too many calls, and managing an Instagram account I resent. The other 1% is the part people think is the whole job.

One of those “nobody asked for” projects was African Face, Colonial Tongue — a short film made with Serati Maseko, a South African artivist raised across three continents. The film is based on her essay about 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 draw storyboards by hand and tend to fall a little too deep into technical rabbit holes — Gaussian splatting, Unreal Engine, AI. At one point I had a full virtual production tracking setup in my living room.

At a school reunion, an old teacher asked me — genuinely worried — if I could actually make a living doing this.

Still working on the answer.

If you want to talk about a project, argue about cake, or help me answer that question: contact@jenssage.com / +49 (0) 162 45 11 591 / @jenssage.de