Edward Berger (born June 25, 1970) is a West German-born Austrian and Swiss director and screenwriter. He is known for the German films Jack (2014), All My Loving (2019), and All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), which won numerous international awards, including the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, as well as for the English TV series Patrick Melrose(2018) and film Conclave (2024).
Edward Berger was born in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, then West Germany, where he graduated from the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium. He holds Swiss citizenship as his mother was from Switzerland and Austrian citizenship through his father. He grew up in a middle-class family with three siblings. His father worked as a logistics manager at Volkswagen.
After graduating from the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium, he lived in Paris for a few months. He earned his living by selling T-shirts at rock concerts. He had already developed a passion for cinema in his early youth; he lived above a cinema in Paris.
He attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig from 1990 to 1991. Then, he transferred to the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he finished his studies in directing in 1994. At NYU, he created numerous short films that were screened at many international film festivals.
Berger gathered his first work experience at the U.S. independent production company Good Machine, working, among others, on the films of Ang Lee and Todd Haynes. He also gave lectures and carried out workshops at Columbia University, Universität der Künste Berlin and the HFF Potsdam.
Berger has lived in Berlin since 1997. His first feature based on his screenplay was Gomez. He also worked as a screenplay author and director for the television series KDD – Kriminaldauerdienst episodes. Aside from television productions, for which he frequently wrote screenplays, he has also directed films. In 2012, his film A Good Summer was awarded the Grimme-Preis. His film Jack was invited to the official competition at the Berlinale in 2014. It was awarded the 2015 German Film Award in Silver for the best feature film. Since August 2014, Berger has directed the eight-part television series Deutschland 83, for which he won an International Emmy after premiering it at the 2015 Berlinale. He also directed the limited series Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, for which he won his first BAFTA Award for Best Limited Series. In 2022, Berger wrote and directed All Quiet on the Western Front, for which he won the Academy Award for Best International Film while receiving a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Picture and an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film went on to win a total of four Academy Awards and seven BAFTAS, among them a BAFTA Award for Best Direction, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and a BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, making it the most successful foreign language film ever.
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