Sebastian Winkels was born in 1968 and worked as a camera assistant before entering the Konrad Wolf Academy of Film & Television (HFF/B) in Potsdam-Babelsberg in 1996. His film The Upper Storey (Oberstube) was presented in the short film competition at Venice in 2000. His feature length Seven Brothers (2003) is a documentary experiment, a pure narrative cinema. Seven brothers, all born between 1929 and 1945, meet. Together, they tell the story of their family. Seven different paths in life belong to a rare generation, for whose childhood the "Stunde Null" in 1945 represented either the end or just the beginning. An intimate mosaic between the brothers forms a type of family universe mirroring an unusual account of German contemporary history.