Urs Odermatt

Urs Odermatt (born 28 February 1955 in Stans, canton of Nidwalden) is a Swiss film director and author.

After working for several years as a freelance journalist, film critic and photographer, Odermatt trained to be a film director and screenwriter under the two Polish pastmasters Krzysztof Kieślowski and Edward Żebrowski. He works in Germany and Switzerland as a director in film, television and theatre. In 1990 he founded the production company Nordwest Film AG with the cameraman Rainer Klausmann.

Odermatt is the son of the Nidwalden photographer Arnold Odermatt and has published his father’s work since 1993 (Springer & Winckler Galerie, Berlin; Steidl Verlag, Göttingen). In 1992 during research for his feature film Wachtmeister Zumbühl (Constable Zumbühl), he discovered his father’s photo archive and grouped the works together into the collections entitled Meine Welt, Karambolage, Im Dienst and In zivil.

Odermatt lives and works in Windisch in Switzerland.

Along with the cameramen, the Swiss Rainer Klausmann and Pole Piotr Lenar, the Munich composer of film music, Prof. Dr. Norbert J. Schneider (now known as Enjott Schneider) also regularly work closely with Odermatt.

Odermatt worked on two of the craziest episodes of the TV shows Tatort and Polizeiruf 110, that really took off with their "successful mix of seriousness and intelligent humour that makes a pleasant change from the monotony of crime series" (Stern 25/1996) with a "curious collection of crazy characters (...), providing the realistic main characters with a grotesque wallpaper as a background" (FAZ, 17 June 1996). "Having so much wicked humour was a rarity in the crime genre" (Der Spiegel 24/1996).

In 1989, Gekauftes Glück was regarded by the press and cinemagoers as one Switzerland’s most successful films d'auteur. Critics praised the "careful choreography of the images make a pleasant change from the usual loquaciousness of the films d’auteur in the German language" (Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 March 1989).

Wachtmeister Zumbühl was unsettling in its claustrophobic depiction of the closed society of a small village, where everybody knows everybody else and all of their business, "the world in a water droplet" (Krzysztof Kieślowski).

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