Max Sänger is a director, cinematographer and editor based in Hamburg, Germany, where he studied documentary film at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. His bachelor’s film Spineless Kingdom about a British naturalist was awarded several prizes and his master’s project Kayu Besi about a group of Indonesian loggers premiered in the German Competition at DOK Leipzig and has since been shown at numerous film festivals.
His films are sensitive observations that do not simply make the lives of their protagonists visible, but trace their rhythm, their physicality and their specific view of the world. As such they do not impose any logic of narration and representation on their main characters, but conversely, make the encounter itself the starting point of a cinematic form, a documentary gaze. At the center of his creative interest are human relationships to their natural environment, habitats, animals and other non-human life forms.
With friends and colleagues Max co-founded the Gorgofilm collective.