Thomas Miklautsch (born: 26. Oct. 1971 in Austria) is founder of New World Spirits, producing films and videos since 1994. After finishing school in Austria, he attends the university in Klagenfurt. Soon he realizes, that small town Austria and the world of theoretical studies is not his one. At the age of 11 he jumps for the first time in his life on a windsurf board in Austria – this contact marks the beginning of a lifetime journey – a journey across extreme sports and documentary filmmaking.
Thomas achieves various national titles and top international rankings at several windsurfing competitions worldwide between 1983 and 1995. A big change appeared in the year 1992 when he gets in touch with filmmaking for the first time during the windsurfing crossing from Malta to Sicily. From that moment, Thomas takes the filmmaking of his adventures into his own hands.
In 1995 he realizes his first film project about the windsurf crossing from Australia to Papua New Guinea. Ambitioned by a strong affection to filmmaking he creates a new style of capturing extreme sports on digital video. All windsurfing documentaries are visually narrated by an adventurous storyline consisting of cultural and philosophical elements. Social critics, the destroying of Nature and indigenous cultures were further topics of these documentaries.
The film „Camanchaca“, an extreme windsurfing trip from the Atacama desert of Northern Chile to the most Southern point of the South American Continent in 1998, was awarded 13 times at international film festivals.
In the year 2006 Thomas enrolled for the summer program in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California (USC-Film School). He took two professional classes in “Directing Actors” and “Screenwriting”. In 2010 he attended the directing classes at Judith Westons Acting and Directing Studio in Los Angeles.
Between 2005 and 2011 New World Spirits produced several documentaries about nature topics in Austria and Southamerica, produced dvds for well know Austrian sportsmen like Markus Rogan and he was hired as camera operator and director for the Red Bull Cliff Diving tour. His latest project was a 48min documentary about Cape Horn, produced by Red Bull Mediahouse for the HD channel “Servus TV”. Thomas is constantly updating his knowledge of modern filmmaking by both taking professional courses and producing high end tv-productions with the newest technique available.
