Franz Böhm was born and raised in Gerlingen, northwest of Stuttgart. At 16, he made his first short film, Harmony of Others, about interactions among teenagers from different social backgrounds. In 2017, he created the medium-length, fictionalized documentary Christmas Wishes, depicting the lives of two homeless people in Berlin, for which he lived with the homeless for a while. This project opened the BW Youth Film Prize in 2017 and won several awards.