DANI LEVY, Writer/Director
Dani Levy was born in Basel in 1957 and has lived in Berlin since 1980. He performed on stage in Basel and in Berlin before he made his debut as a director with Same to You (1986) for which he received the Best Film Award at the Vevey Comedy Festival. He was honored with additional awards for his film Robby Kalle Paul (Audience Award at the 1989 Max-Ophüls Festival) and for I Was on Mars (FIPRESCI Award for Best Film in San Sebastian). His short film Ohne Mich (1993) earned him the Best Director Award from Hypobank at the Munich Film Festival.
The following year, Levy joined up with Stefan Arndt, Wolfgang Becker and Tom Tykwer to found the production company X Filme Creative Pool. Stille Nacht, which was X Filme’s first project, ran in the International Competition at the Berlin Film Festival. In 1997, Levy directed the thriller Meschugge, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and won both the Bavarian Film Prize and the prize for Best Cinematography in 1999. That same year, Levy shot The Secret in Iceland and Munich, the first 360º film for the “Autostadt” (Automotive theme city) of Wolfsburg. In the spring of 2001, Levy shot his first video clip. The clip, “Adriano – Letzte Warnung”, was for the band Brothers Keepers, which is a collective of 14 Afro-German artists. The next year, the family drama I’m the Father followed. For a short period in the summer of 2004 Dani Levy returned to the theater, staging “Freie Sicht aufs Mittelmeer” for the Theater Basel, which premiered in September of 2004 and recorded for television in 2005.
For his 2005 comedy Go for Zucker, Levy was the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2005 German Film Prize in the categories Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Film, as well as the Ernst-Lubitsch-Prize.
|
