Biography
Gernot Roll was a German cinematographer and occasional director. Born in Dresden on 9 April 1939, he trained as a cameraman at the DEFA studios in Babelsberg and worked as a camera assistant before moving to West Germany in 1960. He joined Bavaria Film in Munich and later worked freelance from 1976.
Roll's breakthrough came as cinematographer on Edgar Reitz's 16-hour television series Heimat (1984). He collaborated repeatedly with Reitz on later Heimat projects and worked with directors including Caroline Link on Beyond Silence (1996) and the Oscar-winning Nowhere in Africa (2001), and Sönke Wortmann on Maybe... Maybe Not (1994). He also directed several films from the mid-1990s, including Ballermann 6 (1997).
Roll received multiple awards, among them three Deutscher Filmpreise for cinematography and several Adolf-Grimme-Preise. He died in Munich on 12 November 2020.
