MARCO KREUZPAINTNER (Director) Although only 28 years old when producers Roland Emmerich and Rosilyn Heller selected him to take the reins of Trade, director MARCO KREUZPAINTNER had already established himself as one of the leading young directors in his native Germany. His second feature, the coming-out and coming-of-age German feature, Summer Storm, won him the German Film Award (Germany's version of the Oscar) for Best Young Director and earned him a nomination for Best Director and Best Screenplay (which he co-wrote). The movie's lead was also nominated for Best Actor. Distributed by Warner Bros., the film was an official selection at over 50 film festivals worldwide, including Toronto, Berlin, London and Palm Springs.

So impressed was Emmerich with Kreuzpaintner's work on Summer Storm --notably his work with the young cast of actors, many of them non-professionals--that he invited the young director to come to Los Angeles under his aegis to select his next project. That trip resulted in Kreuzpaintner directing his first American-produced project, Trade, for which he imported several of Summer Storm's crew as well as his lead actress, Alicja Bachleda (Veronica). Kreuzpaintner's first full-length feature, Breaking Loose, garnered the best actor prize at the Max Ophuls Festival in Saarbruecken in 2004. For the German television network ZDF he helmed the experimental movie Rec., which was shot without a script and completely improvised with his actors. In 2000, he formed his own production company FilmManufaktur, and also shot The Breathing Artist, which he produced, wrote and directed and which followed his 1999 short Entering Reality. For theatre, Kreuzpaintner directed the Friedrich Schiller play Die Raeuber, for Munich's Volkstheater in 2003. A graduate of the University of Salzburg, Kreuzpaintner is a visiting professor at the Film Academy BadenWurtemberg and was the youngest member of Germany's Regional Parliament. He is a member of the German Film Academy, the German Directors Guild and the Directors Guild of America. Since finishing Trade, Kreuzpaintner has completed a new film, Krabat, a fantasy based on Otfried Preussler's 1971 literary adaptation of a 17th Century legend, The Curse of the Darkling Mill. Germany's biggest domestic production of 2007, Krabat will open in October in Germany on 900 screens (the maximum number).