Christoph Röhl


Christoph Röhl is an award-winning British-German filmmaker.

Early Life and Education

Christoph Röhl was born in Brighton to an English father, the historian John C. G. Röhl, and a German mother Rosemarie von Berg. He read History and German at the University of Manchester achieving a First Class Double Honours Degree.

Career

Christoph Röhl studied film directing and scriptwriting at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie. His first short films received various international awards including the National German Film Award.
After a period directing films for the BBC and ITV, he was approached by Thomas Hoegh, a Norwegian investor and entrepreneur, to set up a film school in London. He took up the offer and co-founded the Met Film School, now located at Ealing Studios in London. Röhl was the school’s director for four years.
Röhl returned to Berlin to direct his first feature film, , in 2007. The film received its premiere at the Shanghai Film Festival and was released in German cinemas in 2009. His next film was a documentary called . The film dealt with the child sex abuse scandal at the well-known Odenwaldschule. The film was nominated for a German TV Award in 2011 and won the Robert-Geisendörfer-Prize in 2012. In 2014 he directed the film with Ulrich Tukur and Julia Jentsch in the lead roles. It was nominated for the Prix Europa Award 2014 and won Best Film at the Zoom Festival in Barcelona.
In 2018 Röhl directed the docudrama , which was broadcast on ZDF to coincide with the centenary of the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the end of the First World War. In the same year, Defender of the Faith , a feature documentary about Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s influence on the Catholic Church and the events leading to his historic resignation as Pope Benedict XVI in February 2013, was released in German cinemas. The film received its premier at the DOK.fest München. More than a mere portrait of Joseph Ratzinger, it is a portrayal of a whole system whose rigidity and inflexibility has led it into a cul-de-sac.
In 2014 he was presented with The World Childhood Foundation Award by Queen Sylvia of Sweden for "whose work to combat child abuse was recognized by the World Childhood Foundation".

Filmography (Selection)