Gallery
All Pictures (4)Biography
Walter Steffen was born in Oberstdorf on 9 March 1955. After graduating from high school, he travelled around the world and worked in a variety of professions, among others as a metallurgist, dock worker, surveyor and long-distance lorry driver. During these years he also had a job as a lighting technician for film productions. In 1981 he completed an internship at the Munich children's and youth theatre 'Schauburg'. Between 1982 and 1984, he worked for various film and television productions as assistant producer and director.
In 1985 Steffen began working as a freelance author and director of industrial, educational and image films. He also directed several short films that were shown at international festivals. From 1991 he has been writing screenplays for series and television films, until 2002 with Manfred Birkl as co-author. The team wrote several episodes of the crime series "Schwarz greift ein" (1995), the comedy "Weekend mit Leiche" (1997, starring Uwe Ochsenknecht), Franz Peter Wirth's last film "Typisch Ed! (1999) and the drama "Natalie - Babystrich Ostblock" (2003, directed by Franziska Meyer Price), the fifth part of the infamous "Natalie" series.
In 2007 Steffen founded the company Konzept+Dialog.Medienproduktion in Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg. With it he realized his first long documentary film "Bulldogs - Traktorgeschichten vom Starnberger See" (2007, together with Harald Seitz). Two years later the documentary "Netz & Würm - Die Fischer am Starnberger See" followed, 2010 "Zeug & Werk - Handwerkergeschichten vom Starnberger See". For these "cinematic declarations of love to Lake Starnberg", he was awarded the culture prize of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Tassilo Prize, in 2010.
Steffen's documentary film "Endstation Seeshaupt" (2011) also attracted much attention. It is about the journey of a train, which in April 1945 was sent on an odyssey through Bavaria carrying about 4,000 concentration camp prisoners from the Dachau subcamp Mühldorf-Mettenheim in order to hide the prisoners in the Alps from the Allied troops. The film was voted Documentary of the Month by the Filmbewertungsstelle Wiesbaden (German Film Quality Assessment Board) and received the Cultural Prize of the Weilheim-Schongau district for documentary film work. The film was also included in the archive of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.
Steffen also frequently dealt with different aspects of Bavaria, Bavarian history and the Fünfseenland in his other cinema documentaries. These include "Gradaus daneben" (2011), about eight lateral thinkers and masters of the art of living from the Bavarian Oberland; "Trüffeljagd im Fünfseenland" (2013), about hidden cultural and human treasures of the five-lake region; "Bavaria Vista Club", about the Upper Bavarian music scene; and "Fahr ma obi am Wasser" ("Ride the River" 2017), about the raftsmen on the Isar and Loisach rivers.
Steffen also made a documentary about the artist Hannes Fritz-München, the only German court painter of the Indian Maharajah ("München in Indien" / "Munich in India", 2012), as well as two films about the organisation "Clowns Without Borders": "Happy Welcome" (2015) and "Joy in Iran" (2018). The latter was awarded Best Documentary at the Independent Cinema Festival in Bahía (Brazil).
With "Alpgeister" (2019), Steffen returned to his homeland: in the film he traces the myths and legends of the Alpine region and the belief in an otherworldly reality associated with them. The film was released in the summer of 2019. Like all his films, Walter Steffen released it through his production company's distribution branch.
Walter Steffen lives on Lake Starnberg.