Christoph Schaub
Christoph Schaub’s career begins during the youth movement in Zurich in the summer of 1980. While the city is in flames, he is on the road to film the riots. He captures what he and his peers are concerned with. His curiosity and his sense for moving scenes will both later approve to be the fundamental tools for his work.
Born in 1958, Christoph produces his first films with the film production company Zürcher Videoladen. He shares his world of expirience as ayoung polotical filmmaker. Christoph quits his German studies, when his cinematic career as a director begins to shape in the early eighties. Instead of goining to a film school he develops this film making skills as an autodidact and assists in directing, camera and editing.
Through his debut feature film Wendel (1987), Christoph broadens his perspective with a poetic reflection of a unique male friendship. His following feature films address emotions such as grief, fear and euphoria or utopian visions. Dreissig Jahre depicts the melancholy of young adults longing for their youth. Am Ende der Nacht is the story of a crazed man murdering his wife and son. The three films reflect the tension of individuals who endure but want to escape. This conflicting tension characterises all of Christoph’s films to the present.
In the mid nineties, he nstarts makingdocumentaries about architecture. The first of them, IL GIRASOLE, he makes with a friend of him, an architect. Further documentaries about architecture and structures follow, among others including those about Peter Zumthor, Gion A. Caminada, Santiago Calatrava and Herzog & de Meuron. His latest film is ARCHITECTURE OF INFINITY for which he received the prestigious award 2020 at 38e FIFI/ Montréal for best essay 2020. Christoph Schaub is fascinated by finding the correlation between the filmed space and the narration.
During this period he also works intensively on fictional film subjects. He realises among others the films Stille Liebe, Sternenberg, Jeune Homme, Happy New Year, Giulias Verschwinden, Nachtlärm. Many of his films reach a wide audience, and receive national as well as international film awards. Christoph Schaub’s current work includes feature films and documentaries both for cinema and television.
Together with his cinematic work, Christoph establishes with a group of like-minded individuals a cinema in the autonomous youth centre in Zurich (AJZ). Later it became the cinema Xenix which is still a popular program cinema space today.. He also cofounded the film production company Dschoint Ventschr AG (1989–1994) and another cinema in the district of Morgental in Zurich (1992–2002). Further, he is involved in building and opening the cinemas Riffraff and Houdini in Zurich as well as the cinema Bourbaki in Lucerne. Theses cinemas are run by the company Neugass Kino (PLC) founded in 1996, of which Christoph has been the president of the board until 2018. For a time, he collaborates also as a Board of the foundations Swiss Films and Zürcher Filmstiftung. Christoph is a member of the Swiss Film Academy, the European Film Academy (EFA) and the Asian Pacific Screen Academy (APSA).
