Biography
Florian Baron was born on 21 June 1984 in Berlin. In 2003 he began studying Japanese Studies in Erlangen; the following year he went to Ryukyu University in Okinawa, Japan, as a guest student in art education. Until 2006 he lived in Japan, where he realized among other things a documentary film about the art and architecture project 'Wanakio'.
Back in Germany, he began studying directing at the University of Television and Film in Potsdam (now: Film University Babelsberg) in 2007, which he completed with distinction in 2012. His 60-minute graduation film "The Final Call", in which he set his own story in essayistic manner in relation to the catastrophes of our time, was shown at several festivals.
In 2014 Baron received a scholarship from the DAAD for further artistic education at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. In the USA he also shot the short documentary "Joe Boots" (DE/US 2017), about the traumas of a young Iraq veteran. The film won the German Human Rights Film Award 2018.
Following on from "Joe Boots", Baron made his first feature-length documentary in 2018: In "Stress", five young veterans tell of their experiences in the war in Afghanistan. At the DOK Leipzig 2018 festival, "Stress" won the DEFA prize for an "outstanding long German documentary film", and at the Munich DOK.fest 2019 festival it received the German Documentary Film Music Prize. The German cinema release was in February 2020.