Bastian Clevé
Film Director, Producer, University Teacher, Writer of Textbooks
One-year Scholarship in 1976/77 for Film and Television Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, USA

"My DAAD scholarship brought fundamental personal and professional changes for the better"

Bastian Clevé began with short films in 1969. He has meanwhile made around 40 of these, of which 13 alone were rated as "besonders wertvoll" (of special merit). Three of them won "Deutsche Filmpreise" (German Film Prizes). From the end of the 1970s, he also made a name for himself as a director, screenplay writer and producer of full-length films: Clevé's film "Soweit die Füße tragen" (As far as my feet will carry me), one of the most expensive German cinema productions of recent decades, was also broadcast by Germany's TV channel ARD on 27 December 2003, more or less exactly two years after it premiered.

His most recent film "Klang der Ewigkeit" (Sound of Eternity) was classified as "wertvoll" (of merit). It is a cinematic study of Bach and his Mass in h-minor: in 27 short films that correspond to the 27 parts of the composition, Clevé shows visual associations with Bach's music. The film was first shown to the public in 2005, during the European Music Festival in Stuttgart. The Ensemble Festival Choir and Orchestra Stuttgart, conducted by Helmuth Rilling, played live to the film.

Clevé began his film work in Germany, but got the decisive career kick on the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States. After completing his film studies at Hamburg's College of Fine Art, Clevé received a DAAD scholarship in 1976/77 for a stay at the San Francisco Art Institute. Initially, Clevé went for a year, but stayed for well over a decade. Most of the time, he lived and worked in Los Angeles, where he set up and ran a production company "Eagle Rock Film & TV Productions" in 1981.

The quickly-approaching birth of his first child and the offer of a professorship teaching production at the just newly-opened Ludwigsburg Film Academy (Baden-Württemberg) were what brought Bastian Clevé and his wife back to Germany in 1991. "The chance to use more than 20 years' career experience and my own ideas to create a coherent and integrated degree programme at the Filmakademie, that was very tempting indeed," is how Clevé explains his decision. Clevé sees the concept behind the new academy and the new degree programme in "Production"