Uwe Belz, born October 5, 1937, in Berlin, was a passionate musician as a teenager and taught himself to play the trumpet, the double bass, and the guitar. After finishing high school, he graduated from an apprenticeship as an optician and subsequently attended Fachschule für Fotografie und Optik in Berlin-Weißensee and was trained to become a photographer. After his graduation, Belz worked as an assistant camera operator and finally as cinematographer for Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF). During the early 1960s, he made his first filmmaking experiences as assistant director for commercial and corporate films until he found a long-term position at DEFA’s studio for popular scientific films in 1963. When corporate films became more and more important from the mid-1960s on, Belz received several assignments from DEFA in this department.

From 1963 to 1968, he also studied directing at Deutsche Hochschule für Filmkunst in Potsdam-Babelsberg. Belz subsequently became a member of DEFA’s artistic work group "document" alongside fellow members like Jürgen Böttcher, Volker Koepp, Winfried Junge, and Karlheinz Mund. Besides propagandistic joint projects like "Wer die Erde liebt" (1973) about the tenth World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, Belz finished several films that dealt with every day conditions of life and work, for instance, "Min Herzing" (1975), a portrait of a fishwife in Rostock, or "Begegnungen im Schnee" (1979) about residents of the northern part of the GDR who had to suffer through the natural disaster in the winter of 1979.

Highly praised by critics, Belz became an enormously keen to experiment filmmaker who used voice-over commentary in an original way and worked with humorous inserts or striking intertitles.

Thematically, Belz’s films are broad in scope. He made portrait films, for instance, "Bei Manfred Krug" (1975) about Manfred Krug or "702 sec. mit Frank Schöbel" (1972) about pop singer Frank Schöbel and dealt with German history in an unconventional way in films like "Liebesbriefe" about Karl Marx. Furthermore, Belz made documentary films about the living conditions in countries like Vietnam, China, Laos, and Siberia. In the films, he managed to single out highly different fates of individuals to give an insight into the people’s different areas of life.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liquidation of DEFA, Uwe Belz worked as a freelance director and screenplay writer from 1991 on. Besides, he temporarily worked as a guest lecturer for directing and film editing at Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen "Konrad Wolf" in Potsdam-Babelsberg.

Uwe Belz, who was married and was the father of two daughters, died on December 17, 2002, in Berlin.