About the Director

Dieter Weihl was born in San Francisco to German immigrant parents.  He ended his formal education after two weeks at the College of Marin when he decided to hitch from Cairo to Cape Town, living with the Dinka people of Southern Sudan for several months along the way.

Upon his return to the U.S., he worked as a private investigator filming insurance fraud suits involving workmen’s compensation cases.  Armed with a 16mm Bolex camera and a telephoto lens, the clandestine shooting style sparked his interest in filmmaking. After extensive travel through Europe and Asia he migrated back to San Francisco and opened an ice cream shop in Fisherman’s Wharf.  With ice cream money, he began preproduction on his first film, China Lake, which went on to win the Grand Prize at Mannheim International Film festival in 1989. After China Lake, he moved to Brussels, wrote screenplays for the European Script Fund, and served a stint in an ex-patriot bagel shop. He was Tom Stoppard’s pool-boy and picked tomatoes with John Malkovich in Buckinghamshire, England. With the little Script Fund money that remained, he bought a single chip camera and left Europe for Florida.

Recently he completed the design and development of an apartment complex in West Oakland, California.

As a founding member of Poolside Studios in San Francisco, he’s done extensive studio recording of experimental sound effects and audio for film. In 2006, he produced David Barths’ Hard Right at the Players Theater in New York City.

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