Tobias Deml is a social impact filmmaker from Vienna, Austria.

Tobias co-founded the SIE Society, the leading international alliance for Social Impact Entertainment. He acts as its Head of Content, curating the listings of 300+ SIE organizations and 200+ know-how resources. Tobias has helmed more than 100 projects as cinematographer, director or producer. He’s best known for directing the HBO Max Docu-Series “Gaming Wall St”, narrated by Succession’s Kieran Culkin.

Tobias’ other work has been distributed by streamers like Netflix and premiered at festivals such as SXSW. He likes to bridge the worlds of Hollywood-style entertainment and serious impact research, traveling around the globe for impact-focused conferences such as the SBCC Summit in Bali, Indonesia and Marrakech, Morocco. He is the co-founder of Manhattan-based production company Prodigium Pictures.

In 2012, Tobias had a near-death experience that led to a full personal and professional pivot – towards creating socially valuable and lasting impact as a filmmaker rather than “just entertainment”. To scrutinize this intent with hard evidence, he went on to study film theory at UC Berkeley and co-founded the magazine Cinema of Change, partially based on his 80-page Berkeley thesis “Cinema of Change: The Persuasive Impact of Narrative Motion Picture on Individual and Society“. For the magazine, he and co-founder Robert Rippberger published articles from authors around the world, interview film and psychology experts like Philipp Zimbardo, and organized conferences and discussion rounds. In 2020, Cinema of Change transformed into what is now known as the SIE Society.