The people
behind Tindra

Maria von Heland is a Swedish writer and director based in Berlin. Trained under Alexander Mackendrick at the California Institute of the Arts, she works in English, German, Swedish and French and leads Tindra’s creative work.

She made the short films Chainsmoker and Real Men Eat Meat, the latter shot in Mongolia. Her feature Big Girls Don’t Cry (Columbia Pictures, 2002) starred Karoline Herfurth and Anna Maria Mühe.

She co-wrote England!, The Rainbowmaker and Hector and the Search for Happiness, starring Simon Pegg and Rosamund Pike, and wrote Hilde. In Sweden she wrote and directed Sök and the two-part thriller Den som viskar with Pernilla August. Her German television work includes fairy-tale films, crime and drama for ARD, ZDF and Sat.1, among them Solo für Weiss and Nord Nord Mord.

With Diederik van Rooijen she co-created Heirs of the Night, twenty-six episodes filmed across six countries. It is one of her three productions nominated for an International Emmy Kids Award.

From 2008 to 2018 she was Artistic Director and Writer of the European Film Awards. She has taught acting and writing at the Akademie für Darstellende Kunst Baden-Württemberg, Alma Löv and Raindance in London.

In 2021 she founded Tindra Film with Johnny West. Its first production, Sunshine Eyes, was conceived, shot and finished inside the Berlin lockdown, won the International Panorama Jury Award at Séries Mania 2022 and was later acquired by Netflix DACH. She went on to make Slava the Dog for ARD and NDR, co-created with Ukrainian filmmakers at the start of the war.

Maria serves on the board of the European Women’s Audiovisual Network (EWA).

Victor Nikolaidis is a media entrepreneur from England, whose work spans international news, broadcast services and media technology. He is joining Tindra to lead the business.

His career began in television news in Germany in 1989, with ABC News. He went on to become a producer and Berlin bureau chief for Worldwide Television News, covering Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and Africa. From 1994 to 1997 he worked in London as a senior field producer and cameraman for Associated Press.

He later moved into building and running media companies. His work has included Westminster Live, the London broadcast facilities business he co-owned, and the television production company Picture-Connect. In Berlin, he led Camelot Broadcast Services and worked in media technology as managing director of Ella Lab.

His experience covers studio facilities, location production, transmission and live broadcasting. At Tindra, his focus is on the company’s commercial development and partnerships.

Johnny West is a journalist, author and co-founder of Tindra Film. He has worked in international reporting, media development and natural-resource governance.

He studied Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, Arab Studies at Georgetown University and Computer Science at Ars Digita University.

A fluent Arabic speaker, he worked as a Reuters correspondent in the Middle East before founding the independent media platform Out There News. He later directed media projects in Afghanistan and Europe with Internews and the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, and served as Oil Sector Governance Advisor to the United Nations Development Programme.

In 2010 he founded OpenOil, a transparency initiative in the global oil industry. He was the architect of the Global Registry of Fossil Fuels at Carbon Tracker. A Shuttleworth Fellow and board member of the Open Knowledge Foundation, he directs Koinon Consulting.

He is the author of Karama!: Journeys Through the Arab Spring, a first-hand account of the uprisings across the Middle East.