24/03/2014 - Pandora Film loses one of its brightest stars

Karl Baumgartner, or “Baumi” to his friends, has died at the age of 65. “He was the soul of our company, the spiritus rector, the contrarian and the obsessed man who was in love with the word ‘cinema’,” states the team of Pandora Film. “His passions were films and stories that make people love and cry. It didn’t matter to him if a young, unknown director came from the US or if he was a documentary filmmaker from Kazakhstan. When he liked a project, he decided to do it. His only selection criterion was that he saw and sensed something special in it.”

The South Tyrol-born producer left his homeland and started out as a film critic, sound recordist and assistant director in Rome. Due to the political situation in Italy, he moved to Frankfurt, where he founded, together with his business partner Reinhard Brundig, the legendary Harmonie arthouse cinema. In 1982, the duo set up the distribution company Pandora Film, which released arthouse films from all over the world. These two veritable film lovers quickly gained a reputation in the industry when they started releasing films by talented directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, Mira Nair and Jane Campion. The Piano became Pandora Film’s biggest box-office hit.

In the early 1990s, Baumgartner and Brundig stepped into film production. One of the first Pandora productions was Underground by Emir Kusturica, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The 100-strong list of titles that Pandora produced reads like an encyclopaedia of arthouse films, including features such as Il ladro di bambini by Gianni Amelio, Winged Migration by Jacques Perrin, Le Havre [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Aki Kaurismäki
film profile] by Aki Kaurismäki and the upcoming The Cut by Fatih Akin.

For his visionary work, Baumgartner received various awards, such as the Raimondo Rezzonico Prize at Locarno and the Berlinale Camera, which was awarded to him at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival. His family, friends and fellow filmmakers came together at a memorial ceremony held at the German Film Museum in Frankfurt on 23 March, where he was wished: “Ti auguriamo buon viaggio, caro Baumi.”