Biography
The director and screenwriter Sebastian Meise was born in 1976 in Kitzbühel, Austria. After studying painting at the Art Students League of New York from 1994 to 1996, he first studied philosophy and musicology at the University of Vienna before taking up directing studies at the Vienna Film Academy in 2000 in the class of Peter Patzak.
Here he made the short film "Prises de vues" (2003), co-directed with and based on a screenplay by Thomas Reider with whom he was also to write the screenplays for all his subsequent films. In just 11 minutes, the film spans an entire life course and tells the story of a son's search for identity in the absence of his father. "Prises de vues" was screened at several (international) festivals, including the Diagonale in Graz and the Venice Biennale. The two short films "Random" (2005) and "Dämonen" (2006) which center on three fatal relationships based on mutual dependence where also made at the Vienna Film Academy.
In 2007, Sebastian Meise founded the Vienna-based production company FreibeuterFilm together with editor and producer Oliver Neumann, production manager Sabine Moser, and director Sudabeh Mortezai. With FreibeuterFilm he produced his subsequent films.
His first long feature film, "Stillleben" ("Still Life"), which was released in 2011 and screened at numerous international festivals, dealt with the topic of pedophilia told through the story of a family who learns that the father is sexually attracted to his daughter and lives out his fantasies with prostitutes. According to Meise, the idea for the film came from Thomas Reider, who was inspired by a program set up at the Charité hospital in Berlin for people with pedophilic tendencies but who had not yet pursued them. The documentary film "Outing," released in 2012, was also dedicated to this sensitive topic. In it, Sebastian Meise portrays archaeology student Sven, who is one of the first people to speak on camera about the difficult struggle against his forbidden inclinations.
Meise's next feature film, the Austrian-German co-production "Große Freiheit," premiered in July 2021 at the film festival in Cannes. It is about an intimate friendship forged in prison between a gay man imprisoned for his predisposition and a convicted murderer. Highly acclaimed by critics, by the end of 2021 the drama had been screened at nearly 30 prestigious international film festivals, won numerous awards, and became Austria's official submission for the February 2022 Academy Awards in the category of Best Foreign Language Film.