Biography
Florian Ross was born on 30 May 1982 in Saarbrücken. He made his first short film at the age of 16. After graduating from high school and completing his community service, he trained as a media designer for image and sound in Düsseldorf and has been working in this profession since 2006. Ross also made short films and music videos. With the short film "Clooney" (2007) he applied to the Film Academy Ludwigsburg - without success. The film was invited though to a couple of festivals, among them the renowned Manhattan Short Film Festival. After further unsuccessful applications, Ross started studying at the International Film School (ifs) in Cologne, from 2010 to 2014 where he made several short films.
His graduation film, the tragicomic coming-of-age friendship story "Das Gewehr" (2014) with Franz Dinda and Edin Hasanovic, won the Engelke Short Film Award at the Emden-Norderney Film Festival. It proved to be a stroke of luck that the film also brought Ross and his screenwriter Finn C. Stroeks to the attention of the employees of Matthias Schweighöfer's production company Pantaleon Films. While Stroeks worked on the script for Schweighöfer's "Der Nanny" ("The Manny", 2015), Ross took over marketing and advertising for the film, as well as for "Der geilste Tag" ("The Most Beautiful Day", 2016) and the first season of Schweighöfer's Amazon series "You Are Wanted" (2017). He also shot commercials for Krombacher beer (2015) and the Amazon TV Stick (2016, with Schweighöfer as testimonial).
With Pantaleon Films, Ross also realised his cinema debut in 2017, the tragicomic road movie "Vielmachglas" ("A Jar Full of Life"), about a young woman (Jella Haase) who sets off on an eventful journey after a stroke of fate. The film was released in the cinemas in March 2018.
Two years later, in the summer of 2020, Ross' second feature film came to the cinemas: "Takeover - Voll vertauscht" ("Takeover - The Swap"), a comedy about two identical looking teenagers who did not know each other before and now decide to swap roles. The leading roles were played by the two Youtube stars Heiko and Roman Lochmann, better known as "Die Lochis".