Stefan Kolditz

A child of post-World War II Germany, screenwriter Stefan Kolditz has made a first-rate career crafting scripts inspired by a combination of national history and personal experience. After serving a term of compulsory military service with the East German armed forces, Kolditz studied the performing arts at Berlin's esteemed Humboldt University. In the mid-1980s, his screenplay for the film "Atkins" made it to the big screen in his home country. Interestingly enough, the movie was an apolitical Western about the American frontier. The son of respected director Gottfried Kolditz, the younger Kolditz was by now devoting much of time to teaching film. All the while, he was writing. In a flurry of activity beginning in the mid-1990s, Kolditz completed scripts for "Burning Life," a heist comedy about a pair of female crooks, and several made-for-television movies. The years that followed would see Kolditz write his most searing and personal work to date--"Gripsholm," his first film of the 2000s, told a love story set against the rise of Hitler and the onset of World War II. His follow-up was the comparatively lighthearted crime flick "12 Past Midnight," but by the middle of the decade Kolditz was again finding inspiration in his country's fraught history. Back-to-back, Kolditz penned a pair of weighty made-for-TV films. The first, "Dresden," focused on the World War II destruction of the eponymous German city, while the latter, "An die Grenze" was inspired by Kolditz's military service.