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Frederick Douglas Stephan Baker was born in Salzburg on January 26 1965. The son of an Austrian-British couple was raised in London, and studied anthropology and archaeology in Sheffield, Tübingen and Cambridge. In 2010, he received his Phd in Cambridge.
In 1992, Baker directed the stage films "Obatzt is" and "Offener Vollzug", which brought him together with Bavarian comic and author Gerhard Polt. He went on to work as an author and director for television networks in England and Austria. In his numerous documentaries, he focuses on political and cultural phenomena, and his award-winning works include the BBC productions "The German Giant - Helmut Kohl" (1998), "Big Brother - The Stasi - East Germany's Secret Police" (1999), "The Haider Show" (2000) and "Stalin: Red God" (2002), as well as the British-Austrian co-production "Imagine IMAGINE" (2003) and "Shadowing the Third Man" (2004). In 2008, Baker made the TV documentary "Romy Schneider – Eine Frau in drei Noten", and two years later, he caught attention with "Widerstand in Haiderland" (2010), which was partly based on his older BBC productions.
In 2013, he directed his first fiction feature film with Gerhard Polt as the lead: "Und Äktschn!", which was released in 2014, tells the story of an amateur filmmaker from rural Bavaria who sets out to make a film about Adolf Hitler.
In addition to his filmmaking career, Frederick Baker also teaches film at Cambridge University, where he initiated an interdisciplinary project combining film and archaeology based on his book "The Art of Projectionism" (2007), and started a five-year research project on Arthur Schnitzler in 2013.
"Fred" Baker died in Vienna after severe illness on August 24, 2020.