Born in Germany, Florian moved to New Zealand at the age of eight with his family. He has directed a number of films including Liebesträume 2000, Woodenhead 2003 and Kaikohe Demolition 2004.

Woodenhead is renowned for the innovation of recording the dialogue, as Florian used different actors to record the narrative before shooting the film.

Kaikohe Demolition won the Best Digital Feature at the New Zealand Screen Awards in the year it was released. Florian developed a feature script Permissive Paradise at the Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam.

In 2008 Florian completed the feature Rubbings From a Live Man, a documentary performed by and based on the life of Warwick Broadhead, which he co-produced with Philippa Campbell. Long time collaborator Chris Pryor is Director of Photography. Rubbings From a Live Man premiered in the New Zealand International Film Festival in July 2008. Florian says of this production “in a career that spans forty years, Warwick Broadhead has conceived, directed and performed in over sixty original shows presented in a huge variety of venues both in New Zealand and abroad. He has never allowed his work to be recorded. But now, faced with a film maker’s provocations, the flamboyant performer is pushed to re-enact the highest and the lowest moments of his life using his own cast of alter egos.”

Fishing meets philosophy in Florian’s documentary Land of the Long White Cloud. Set entirely on 90 Mile Beach and a Far North pub, the doco takes place during the world's largest Snapper fishing contest. The film premiered in 2009 in Auckland shortly before Florian took up his year-long residency in New York. Florian returned for the nationwide theatrical release in January 2010.

Florian was the inaugural Harriet Friedlander New York Residency recipient. His stay in New York in 2009 and 2010 resulted in the production of the acclaimed film Love Story, which opened the NZ International Film Festival in Auckland and went on to be awarded Best Director, Best Editing and Best Feature Film at the 2011 Aotearoa Film & Television Awards.

In 2014 Pulp: a Film about Life, Death & Supermarkets won the Audience Award at In-Edit Barcelona and an Honorable Jury Mention at the Athens International Film Festival. It was listed as one of 2014's top ten film's in New York's Village Voice magazine and in 2015 the film won best Music Film at the NME Awards in London.

Spookers, Florian's latest documentary, had it's world premiere at Hot Docs 2017, North America’s largest documentary film festival. Spookers tells the story of a quirky and close-knit family of New Zealand sheep farmers who run the most successful scare park in the Southern Hemisphere –creating a family of scarers like no other.

Florian was awarded a senior mentorship place on the 2017 FilmUp Mentorship Programme and one of eight award recipients. Also in 2017, Florian's project 'Under a Full Moon' was been accepted into the Three Rivers Filmmaker Writers Residency in Italy taking place in August and September. The project is one of only four projects selected from around the world.