Biography:

Horst E. Brandt, the German television and movie director, was born in Berlin on January 17, 1923. He grew up in a working class family and apprenticed as a precision mechanic. Brandt began working as an assistant cinematographer at the East German film studios in 1947 at the same time he started an apprenticeship in the film laboratories.

At the beginning of the 1950s, he started working as a cinematographer. Two of the first films he shot were Slatan Dudow’s Stärker als die Nacht and the East German propaganda film about the life of German Communist leader Ernst Thälmann  – Führer seiner Klasse by Kurt Maetzig. His debut as a director was the two-part television crime story Irrlichter und Feuer in 1966. Brandt often wrote his own screenplays and directed them, among others for KLK an PTX – Die Rote Kapelle, the film about one of the most important German anti-Nazi resistance groups.

Horst E. Brandt died on August 22, 2009.