Jochen Laube was born in 1978 in Ludwigsburg. After graduating from high school, he studied at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg and earned his diploma in 2005 with the feature film Urlaub vom Leben. In 2006, he founded Sommerhaus Filmproduktion, producing films such as Christian Schwochow’s Novemberkind and the Grimme Award-winning documentary Sonbol.
From 2008 to 2015, Jochen Laube worked as a producer for teamWorx, later UFA Fiction, where he headed the Ludwigsburg office. During this time, numerous award-winning cinema and television productions were created, including the 2012 International Emmy-nominated miniseries Baron Münchhausen, Kreuzweg, which premiered in the 2014 Berlinale competition and won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay, the Frank Zappa documentary Eat That Question, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, several feature films that won multiple German Film Awards, including Burhan Qurbani’s Wir sind jung. Wir sind stark. and Florian Cossen’s Das Lied in mir, marking his first collaboration with Fabian Maubach.
In 2015, Jochen Laube co-founded Sommerhaus Filmproduktion GmbH with Fabian Maubach. Together, they produced, among others the RAF-themed Tatort episode Der rote Schatten by Dominik Graf, the Netflix miniseries Holiday Secrets, several feature films honored with the German Film Award, including In the aisles (2018, directed by Thomas Stuber), When hitler stole pink rabbit (2019, directed by Caroline Link) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020, directed by Burhan Qurbani).
In 2021, Germany’s most successful fictional social media series to date, the 10-month-long Instagram series Ich bin Sophie Scholl, launched with nearly one million followers.
The first season of The Empress, created by showrunner Katharina Eyssen, had a spectacular debut in September 2022, topping the global Netflix charts for non-English-language series. In 2023, The Empress was awarded the International Emmy for Best Drama Series. After a successful launch of the second season, a third season has already been commissioned.
Most recently, Burhan Qurbani’s Shakespeare adaptation Kein Tier. So Wild. was completed and premiered at the Berlinale 2025.
Jochen Laube was selected for the Producers on the Move program at Cannes 2013, is a member of the German Film Academy and serves on the board of trustees of VfB Stuttgart’s foundation “Brustring der Herzen”. He was part of the First Steps Jury and teaches at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg.
He is also a co-shareholder of two cultural institutions in Ludwigsburg, the Scala cinema and Theatersommer, where he is the initiator and curator of the Ludwigsburg Film Festival “Lichtspielliebe”.