“Veit Heiduschka: The Man Behind Austria’s Film History”

With his Wega Film he wrote large parts of the red-white-red film heritage after 1945. That was not originally foreseeable. Heiduschka was born on May 20, 1938 in Döbeln, Saxony. He later grew up in East Germany, where his father was a political prisoner. At the age of 18, Heiduschka first fled to the Federal Republic of Germany before the energetic young man moved to Vienna in 1959, where he had his eye on a career as a writer. After catching up on his Matura, which he was forbidden to do in the GDR due to his father’s political views, he began his studies at the University of Vienna in 1964, which he completed in 1969.

Companion by Michael Haneke

Heiduschka finally came to film as a production manager and managing director of various companies through odd jobs at the theater before founding his own company, Wega Filmproduktionsgesellschaft, in 1980. The small business quickly became one of the main forces in the domestic film landscape and drew for classics such as “Müllers Büro” by Niki List (1986), “Mutters Courage” by Michael Verhoeven (1995), Josef Hader’s “Wilde Maus” (2017) and most recently Arash T. Riahi’s “We’re staying a bit” (2020).

Above all, however, Wega Film made a name for itself as the company that accompanied the work of Michael Haneke. Beginning with his theatrical debut “The Seventh Continent” (1989), Wega Film has always been on board this internationally successful journey through “The White Ribbon” (2009) to the (for the time being) last work “Happy End” (2017).

President of the Austrian Film Commission

In comparison, Wega’s seven-strong team is a small business, “but we may be better known internationally than in Austria,” Heiduschka once emphasized in the APA interview. And yet he never left it at just one field of activity. He worked as a lecturer at the Vienna Film Academy. He is also President of the Austrian Film Commission (AFC) and Managing Director of the collecting society for audiovisual media (VAM).