Peter Krüger (film director)

Early life

Krüger is the only child from the marriage of Jan Krüger, a Belgian mathematician, and Agnes Claeys. He was born in Ghent where he spent time growing up and began studying music at age eight at the Music School and later studied piano with the Belgian pianist and composer Claude Coppens at the Royal Conservatory.

In 1998 he went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States, where he attended the University of Alabama to study American Literature and Art History. In 1989 he returned to Belgium and studied in Leuven, Belgium, where he attended the Institute of Philosophy and Institute for Cultural Studies (Instituut voor Culturele Studies) of the Catholic University of Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). By 1994, Krüger graduated with a Master's degree in philosophy from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

After graduating in Philosophy Krüger began studying film script writing, directing, and producing. He studied a course of Basic Script Writing at the Flemish Script Academy (Vlaamse Script Academie), Brussels, and completed several European training programs supported by the MEDIA Programme of the European Union: North by Northwest, the Northern European screen writing development program in Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Dublin; and Strategic Film Financing, and Strategic Film Marketing in Luxembourg. In 2000 Krüger went to Maine, United States to study a Master Class Film Directing with American actor, screenwriter, director, and producer Paul Schneider; and in Los Angeles, United States he enrolled in an acting workshop with the American, author, script analyst, and actress Judith Weston.

Career

In 1993 Krüger co-founded, with Belgian writer and director Peter Brosens, Inti Films, a Brussels-based film production company. At Inti Films Krüger produced, amongst others, such award-winning films as 2012’s Kinshasa Kids, an official selection at Venice Days; Renzo Martens' 2013 Enjoy Poverty, an art film on the exploitation of third world poverty; and Peter Brosens' internationally acclaimed Mongolia trilogy, consisting of the documentaries City of the Steppes (1993), State of Dogs (1998) and Poets of Mongolia (1999).

Krüger directed the award winning Antwerp Central, a documentary-feature from Sophimages, which was produced by Jan Roekens. The film, which is based on the book Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, features Antwerp’s main railway station as a location where history, daily life, fiction, and reality are in constant flux. Running as a thread through the film are the dreams and reminiscences of a traveler, who arrives at Antwerp Central and through whose eyes we observe the station. The traveler is played by Belgian actor Johan Leysen (who in 2010 appeared with acclaimed actor George Clooney in The American) Antwerp Central won the Grand Prix at the 29th International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal.

Krüger's second feature film, N - The Madness of Reason, was written in collaboration with Nigerian-born poet and novelist Ben Okri. The film follows the spirit of Raymond Borremans (Michael Lonsdale), a French man who left Europe and who dies in 1988 in Abidjan. His spirit wanders across the West-African continent and evokes a confrontation between European and West-African culture. The film was released at the Berlinale 2014 and is three times winner of the ENSOR awards at the 2015 Ostend Film Festival (Film Festival Oostende). In 2014 N - The Madness of Reason received the Jury Award for Best Film at Cine Migrante International Film Festival, Brasilia, Brazil.

On 7 January 2016, Krüger was announced to direct the The Age of Magic, a film adaptation of Ben Okri's 2014 novel The Age of Magic.