Sebastian Ugovsky-Strassburger

Sebastian Ugovsky-Strassburger is a German author, screenwriter, play wright, theater and film maker, stage and film director, composer, music producer and conductor with notable stations and stopovers of work in Paris, London, Napoli, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Moscow and many other places in the world. He is the son of the German theater and film actress Karin Ugowski and the recently died theater and film director Helmut Straßburger and has German, Jewish and Silesian ancestry. His prior fields of work are writing and staging. His work as a film maker can be assigned to a new generation of independent film d'auteur. Resulting from a classical music education in a school program for highly gifted, he is also certified as a classical pianist, multi-instrumentalist and is certified with perfect pitch (absolute hearing).

Back in the days, the young and enthusiastic writer of early words and maker of first rhythm and music grew up like a circus child, in the side wings of an old theater, where his parents were playing and staging. Novels, prose, screenplays, stage plays, lyrics, treatises, essays: Writing became an early way of run-in, examination, analysis and involvement at surroundings in his young life long before being grown. Early reviewers of his writings like Peter Brasch (brother of director and author Thomas Brasch ("The Passenger", Tony Curtis) and brother-in-law of Katharina Thalbach who was co-acting with Ugovsky-Strassburger's father in the film "Das Blaue Licht" (_The Blue Light (1976)_), and step-uncle of Anna Thalbach) encouraged him to go on with his way of looking at the world and describing of things with a pen, leading to an intransigent court jester of current affairs and human nature. Brasch encouraged his writing and realized Ugovsky-Strassburger's urgency in his fiction writing and the impressiveness regarding his descriptions of observations and his sense for subtle meta-messaging, leading the reader to rethink common sense or prejudices in the human culture. The same with his staging's. Strongest motivation seems to be an unstoppable child-like inner asking of the big "why", and contributing to it with craft, keeping up diversity and public dialogue while wrapping it all with compelling stories.

Already in the age of 16 he shows is diversity and disposition for confrontation and solution orientated thinking by staging and directing his first stage play in his school by directing class mates. A final performance of his graduating class against all odds, because they had no artistic disposition at all. He early got sense for humanity, philosophical and political issues, queries, milieus and disaffection, what lead to his very involved writing series of treatises and essays. His idea of a better world is always retrievable in all of his work and in his uncompromising stand against career thinking.

He had his first stage performances playing classical piano and violin and by singing in choirs in Radio already with 4 years, his first performance as a blues/soul-jazz singer with 14, his first screen appearance as an actor with 15, his first poetry written with 12. His first stage writing "The Triangle" was premiered and performed in the Banlieues of Paris as a street performance when he was only 19. His music (as a producer and composer) can be found all over the world, even in motion pictures and feature films in Europe and US (f.e. Transformers 3: Die dunkle Seite des Mondes (2011) or The Equalizer (2014), a film with Denzel Washington and Chloë Grace Moretz), in theatre staging's, in church choir performances, orchestra works, computer games and Urban music artist releases all over the next decades (often credited as "Gilmano", an additional pseudonym he uses for his music works).

Based on his personal background Ugovsky-Strassburger's work spreads over a comprehensive overall spanning variety of artistic expressions, what he commonly combines in his art works, mostly motivated by his queries to the human society. For his work as a film maker in the way of independent film d'auteur, screenplay development, directing, music scoring and film editing coalesces and is implemented by the same one person showing a unique handwriting in the work. A concept, which was finally only a matter of continuity and time in his development and is based on what he calls "the re-traceable liability for a far-reaching statement" and files this as an issue with our society nowadays, that we can't really backtrack when something goes wrong because of the disseminated liability and irresponsibility between each other.

Sebastian Ugovsky-Strassburger is founder of the German music label REQQORD (formally Slo' Jam) supporting artists with worldwide success, the German film production MAURSEGLER and the VFX/GFX/Post department MAROQQO digital media in Berlin. He is active supporter of the Open Source Movement in the IT world, is activist for gender equality and emancipation of Third World countries to get rid off the word "Third".