Biography
Götz Spielmann was born in 1961 in Wels, Austria. He grew up in Vienna where he wrote his first screenplay while still attending high school and finished his first short films. One of those films was even broadcasted on TV in 1978. In 1980, Spielmann started to study at Vienna"s Filmakademie and successfully graduated seven years later. His 65-minute long graduation film "Vergiss Schneider!" was shown at the 1988 Film Festival Max Ophuels Preis in Saarbrücken and won the jury"s special award.
After his film "Erwin und Julia" (1990) that premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and the TV movie "Das naive Verlangen" (1993), Spielmann finally made his breakthrough on the movie screen with the film "Der Nachbar" (1993): The drama, starring Rudolf Wessely and Dana Vávrová, attracted a lot of attention from film critics and won the Vienna Film Award at the 1993 Viennale Film Festival. Spielmann"s next two films for the movie screen, "Die Fremde" ("The Stranger", 2000) and "Antares", also received positive reviews and became Austria"s official submissions for the Academy Awards in the respective years.
After "Antares", Spielmann took a longer break from directing, set up the production company "Spielmannfilm" with his wife at the time Sandra Bohle in 2006, and wrote the play "Imperium" that premiered at Kammerspiele in Linz in 2007.
At the 2008 Berlinale Film Festival, Spielmann finally presented his sixth film: The drama "Revanche" about a bank robber who wants to take revenge on a policeman who had accidentally killed his lover was praised by film critics, was shown at numerous festivals and won the award as "Best feature film" at the 2009 "Diagonale" Film Festival in Graz, among other awards. In 2009, "Revanche" was also nominated for the Academy Awards as "Best foreign-language film of the year".