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Klaus Maeck was born in Hamburg on July 18 1954. Form 1979 until 1983, he was one of the owners of "Rip Off", the city's first record store for punk music. During that time, he also began shooting Super 8 movies. He moved on to write and produce the feature "Decoder" (1984), which became a cult film beyond the punk scene.
In 1984, Maeck became a co-founder of Freibank Music Publishing, which was initially incepted to manage the copyrights of seminal experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten, yet soon started to sign other musicians. Moreover, Maeck produced and directed the documentaries "William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers" and "Liebeslieder: Einstürzende Neubauten" (1993). He also works as a music advisor for film productions and directed several music videos.
Klaus Maeck teamed up with Fatih Akin and Andreas Thiel to found the production company Corazón International in 2003. In 2008, Maeck and Thiel won the German Film Award for Best Feature Film for their production of Akin's "Auf der anderen Seite" (2007), Thiel, who passed away in 2006, was honored post-humously.
Maeck and Akin went on to produce Özgür Yildirim's gangster melodrama "Chiko" (2008) as well as Akin's comedy "Soul Kitchen" (2009). In addition to his work on all of Fatih Akin's feature films, Maeck also produced "Min Dît - Die Kinder von Diyarbakir" (2009), "UFO In Her Eyes" (2011) and the music mockumentary "Fraktus" (2012).
In 2013, Maeck founded Interzone Pictures and started production on the documentary "B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin", on which he also acted as co-author and co-director (along with Jörg A. Hoppe, Heiko Lange and Miriam Dehne). Chronicling West-Berlin's vibrant underground scene of the early 1980s, the film won the Heiner-Carow-Preis at the 2015 IFF Berlin and was released theatrically in May 2015.
Maeck was also producer of the experimental vision of society "Anhedonia" (2015) and co-producer of the award-winning documentary "Die Liebe frisst das Leben" (2019), about the life and work of musician Tobias Gruben, who died at an early age.
In October 2020, he presented another directorial work of his at Film Festival Cologne: "Alles ist Eins. Ausser der 0.", co-directed by Tanja Schwerdorf, is a documentary about Wau Holland, who founded the Chaos Computer Club in 1981, the first association of German hackers. The film was released in German cinemas in the summer of 2021.