Alexander Hahn

Born

1967-03-23

Birthplace

Riga, Latvia

Biography

Alexander Hahn was born on March 23, 1967 in Riga, Latvia (former USSR), to Olga Hahn, a textile specialist, and Waldemar Hahn, an X-ray engineer, tank commander, wrestling champion of the Soviet Army and passive dissident. Alexander left the Soviet Union together with his parents and his big family - ice-hockey trainer Georg Hahn (uncle), fish selling dancing queen Paula Hahn (grandmother), asthmatic railroad gardener Erwin Hahn (grandfather) and one-toothed Miriamija Zaikina (great-grandmother) - when he was 10 years old. He grew up in Bavaria, Germany. Alexander attended a language school in Munich for a year. One day, while he was traveling to the language school, he saw a movie being made in the Munich subway. Yes, that was his world! After two unsuccessful applications at the film school in Munich, he finally became a student at the Vienna Film Academy. But his time spent at the language school was not in vain! At a film festival, he became an interpreter of the Latvian filmmakers Ivars Seleckis and Talivaldis Margevics. And a short time later he was able to shoot his first 35mm short feature film in Latvia. That was just before the Baltic states declared their independence from the Soviet Union. Alexander Hahn is a German citizen (not to be confused with his Swiss namesake who is a filmmaker as well). He immigrated to Austria in 1989, graduated from the Vienna Filmacademy in 1996. His first feature film "Far Away From St. Petersburg" received 1993 the Gold Special Jury Award at the Houston International Film Festival and was shown at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles. Worked with: (cast) Maria de Medeiros, Chulpan Khamatova, Dominique Pinon, Tobias Moretti, Orlando Wells, Birgit Minichmayr, Detlev Buck, Roland Düringer, Otto Grünmandl, Yevgenia Kryukova, Daniil Spivakovsky, Erni Mangold, Aurelija Anuzhite, Igor Klass, Gundars Abolins and (crew) Justin Krish, Jerzy Palacz, Milanka Comfort, Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov, Reinhard Schwabenitzky, Hubert Sauper, Markus Pöchinger ... (education) Krzysztof Kieslowski, James V. Hart, Ron Bass, István Szabó, Herz Frank and Talivaldis Margevics.