Hans-Christoph Blumenberg

To say German film and TV director Hans-Christoph Blumenberg knows a little about cinema would be a gross understatement; he has absorbed it much of his life, as evidenced by a career that ranges from criticism to movie-themed features to documentaries about some of the world's greatest auteurs. Blumenberg began writing about film in the mid-1960s, working nearly a decade for the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Cologne's largest newspaper. During this time, he directed a television profile of legendary writer-director Preston Sturges, 1970's "Preston Sturges -- Porträt eines Hollywood-Regisseurs," which included interviews with the man's friends and collaborators. Eight years later, after leaving Cologne to work for Die Zeit, a weekly newspaper, Blumenberg followed with another movie documentary: "Ein verdammt gutes Leben -- Howard Hawks." This lead to his first feature, 1984's "Tausend Augen," a melancholy film that deals with the life of a college student working as a peep show model. But Blumenberg didn't abandon film-themed movies; in 1996, he won the German Film Awards' top screenplay honor for "Beim nächsten Ku? knall ich ihn niede," a portrait of German Hollywood director Reinhold Schünzel. Television and suspense features work mostly followed in the next decade, but Blumenberg in the 2000s made a pair of big screen films: in 2001, a dystopian satire about TV, "Planet der Kannibalen," and, in 2008, "Waiting for Angelina," about two young men as they stake out the Berlin apartment of Hollywood uber-couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.