Niki Reiser

Born in northern Switzerland in 1958, Niki Reiser is a musician and composer best known for his scores to German-language films. With a background in classical flute, he studied film scoring at the Berklee School of Music in the early '80s, followed by further study of composition in Basel, Switzerland. He began earning film credits by the mid-'80s, a time that also saw him tour as flutist with his jazz ensemble, People, and begin to write and perform with the klezmer band Kol Simcha. The 1986 film You Love Me Too (Dich Mich Auch) began a long partnership with director Dani Levy that stretched well into the next century and included films such as I Was on Mars (1991), Silent Night (1995), I'm the Father (2002), and the TV movie Der Liebling des Himmels (2015). In the '90s, Reiser became an award-winning scorer with his work on Caroline Link's Beyond Silence, which among other accolades won him a German Film Award in 1997. He would win another in 1998 for The Giraffe and a third in 1999 for Pünktchen und Anton. During that stretch, he continued to tour with Kol Simcha, including performances at the Montreux Jazz Festival and New York's Carnegie Hall. The next decade brought Best Film Score German Film Awards for 2001's Nowhere in Africa (a Link film), 2004's Go for Zucker (a Levy film), and 2008's A Year Ago in Winter (another Link film). He continued to take diverse film assignments in the 2010s, such as 2013's Exit Marrakech (aka Morocco), 2014's WWII investigation Labyrinth of Lies, and Alain Gsponer's 2015 adaptation of Heidi.
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