Documentary & branded content
Documentary is where I started. Long before the corporate work, I was making films that followed people closely and let stories unfold on their own terms — and that discipline shapes everything I shoot now, whether the subject is an artist, a founder, or a family.
My first feature as director and cinematographer, Anna Pavlova Lives in Berlin, won the Prize for Young Film Art from the German National Gallery and the German Film Academy, and was exhibited daily over four months at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin. It has since screened at festivals and museums in more than 25 countries.
Alongside my own films, I have worked as cinematographer on documentaries by other directors: I was cinematographer, co-editor, and colorist on the feature This Is a Dog's World, selected for the Visions du Réel market — one of the world's leading documentary festivals — and one of the cinematographers on two award-winning portraits of the violinist Ida Haendel, both directed by Christine Jezior. The Haendel Variations won Best Feature Documentary in Music at the 2019 World Music Film Festival and streams on Amazon Prime Video; This Is My Heritage is available on TVP VOD, Poland's national public broadcaster. I was cinematographer on Vues de l'Allemagne, a documentary in which German mental-health professionals discuss how children live with and understand a parent's mental illness. And I recently shot an interview in Rome as director of photography for the upcoming HBO Max documentary An American Serial Killer in Cairo, releasing in 2026.
That same documentary approach is what I bring to branded work. For Café Izola in San Diego I was cinematographer on a short brand documentary directed and produced by Sasha Milovanova — the story of a bakery started during the pandemic, named after a grandmother, built around a simple idea of welcome, told entirely through its founders. For the SV-Bildungswerk — a German non-profit that strengthens student representation and youth participation in schools — I directed, shot, and edited SV-Berater verändern Schule, a half-hour documentary about the mentors who help students shape their own schools.
And for the ARCH+ //culture:city project I shot the documentaries Detroit Soup and Pompidou Mobile — a co-production with two of Germany's foremost cultural institutions, the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) and the Akademie der Künste, the Berlin Academy of Arts founded in 1696. A brand documentary works when it stops selling and starts observing; that is the difference between a film people finish and one they close.
I was also co-director and cinematographer on a short film about the Brazilian musician Buhr (formerly Karina Buhr) and her relationship with Berlin and the divided Germany she first visited in 1989, and I filmed a documentary for Autism Spectrum Reach on its work supporting autistic children and their families in Tanzania. I have also filmed for the NGO Books Behind Bars.These are the projects that keep the craft honest — where the only job is to represent someone's reality faithfully.
Whether the film is authored or commissioned, the process is the same: I shoot, edit, colour grade, and finish in-house, and I work closely with you from first concept to final cut.