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Marc Alexander Littler was born on July 6, 1979 in Frankfurt and grew up in Germany, South Africa and the US respectively. He studied directing at the Vancouver Film School in Canada and founded the production company Slowboat Films in 1999 while he was still a student. To this day, the company produces all his films.
Littler's first full-length film was the documentary "Voodoo Rhythm" (2005) about the Swiss rock 'n' roll record label Voodoo Rhythm Records. His next film was also a documentary about music called "The Dead Brothers – Death is not the End" (2006) and featured the Geneva folk band of the same name. With "Zownir – Radical Man" (2006) Littler made a filmic portrait of the idiosyncratic photographer, filmmaker and crime fiction author Miron Zownir.
In 2007, Littler released his feature film debut "The Road to Nod" which was shot in Germany and Ireland and which moved freely between road movie, film noir and underground, infused with motifs taken from rock 'n' roll culture and both the Old and the New Testament. In the documentary "The Folk Singer" (2008) he accompanied folk-blues singer Jon Konrad, a.k.a. "Possessed by Paul James", on tour from Texas to Louisiana. In the movie, much like in his other films, Littler mixes fictitious and documentary scenes and is thereby deliberately making it hard to distinguish fact and fiction.
For the documentary road movie "The Kingdom of Survival" (2011) Littler conducted interviews with radical thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Mark Mirabello and Ramsey Kanaan and employs his film to explore alternative points of view on politics, culture, media and philosophy. The low budget film screened at festivals like Montreal and Amsterdam. While "Kingdom of Survival" relied heavily on interviews and dialog, Littler's follow-up production did not feature a single spoken word: "Lost Coast" (2013), a "nature film", takes the audience to a remote coastal area of California, the Lost Coast. It features grandiose cliffs, beaches devoid of people and endless highways – a meditation on humanity and their relation to nature.
In September 2013, the Goethe-Institut in Porto Alegre, Brazil dedicated a retrospective to Littler. At this occasion he taught a two-week film workshop at the local university. About a year later, in November 2014, the Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt also showcased his films. In this context, "Hard Soil" (US/DE 2014), a poetic documentary about American folk music influenced by punk premiered.
Littler's next film also premiered at the Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt with its first screening in Europe. The feature "Armenia" (DE/AM/FR 2016) is about an Armenian singer who is tired of life and who embarks on a journey in order to reconstruct his family history that has been determined by genocide, exile and diaspora. The film is starring Alain Croubalian, frontman of the band "Dead Brothers" on which Littler had made a documentary ten years earlier. "Armenia" opened in German theaters in January 2017.