Christoph Schaub
Christoph Schaub’s career begins during the youth movement in Zurich in the summer of 1980. While the city is in flames, he is on the road to film the riots. He captures what he and his peers are concerned with. His curiosity and his sense for moving scenes will both later approve to be the fundamental tools for his work.
Born in 1958, Schaub produces his first films with the film production company Zürcher Videoladen. He shares his world of experience as a young political filmmaker. He quits his German studies, when his cinematic career as a director begins to shape in the early 80s. Instead of going to a film school he develops his film making skills as an autodidact and assists in directing, camera and editing.
Through his debut feature film WENDEL (1987), Christoph Schaub broadens his perspective with a poetic reflection of a unique male friendship. His following feature films address emotions such as grief, fear and euphoria or utopian visions. DREISSIG JAHRE depicts the melancholy of young adults longing for their youth. AM ENDE DER NACHT is the story of a crazed man murdering his wife and son. The three films reflect the tension of individuals who endure but want to escape. This conflicting tension characterizes all of Christoph Schaub’s films to the present.
In the mid-90s, he starts making documentaries about architecture. The first of them, IL GIRASOLE, he creates with an architect friend. Further documentaries about architecture and structures follow, among others including those about Peter Zumthor, Gion A. Caminada, Santiago Calatrava and Herzog & de Meuron.
When it comes to architecture, Christoph Schaub is driven by the challenge of staging the space in such a way that it experiences both a cinematic and narrative interpretation. ARCHITECTURE OF INFINITY won the prestigious ‘Best Essay’ award at the 38 th FIFA Montreal in 2020.
His latest oeuvre E.1027 EILEEN GREY AND THE HOUSE BY THE SEA (co-directed with Beatrice Minger in 2024) has received wide theatrical release worldwide and has been invited to numerous festivals. Since 1990 up to now Schaub continues to work intensively on fictional film subjects. He realizes among others the films STILLE LIEBE, STERNENBERG, JEUNE HOMME, HAPPY NEW YEAR, GIULIAS VERSCHWINDEN, NACHTLÄRM. Many of his films reach a wide audience and receive national as well as international film awards.
Christoph Schaub’s current work includes feature films and documentaries both for cinema and television.
Together with his cinematic work, Christoph establishes with a group of like-minded individuals a cinema in the autonomous youth center in Zurich (AJZ). Later it became the cinema Xenix which is still a popular program cinema space today. He also cofounded the film production company Dschoint Ventschr AG (1989–1994) and another cinema in the district of Morgental in Zurich (1992–2002). Further, he is involved in building and opening the cinemas Riffraff and Houdini in Zurich as well as the cinema Bourbaki in Lucerne. Theses cinemas are run by the company Neugass Kino (PLC).
Schaub was chairman of the board of directors from its founding in 1996 until 2018. Since 2022, he has been a member of the board of directors of the architecture and art publishers “Scheidegger & Spiess” and “Parkbooks”. For a time, he collaborates also as a Board of the foundations Swiss Films and Zürcher Filmstiftung. Christoph is a member of the Swiss Film Academy, the European Film Academy (EFA) and the Asian Pacific Screen Academy (APSA).
