Karl Baumgartner was born 1949 in Brunico in Southern Tirol, Italy. From 1967 to 1970 he worked in Rome as an assistant director and occasionally as a film critic. In 1971 he moved to Frankfurt, Germany, and joined the collective of the Harmonie, a very well- known art-house cinema.

In 1981 Karl Baumgartner and Reinhard Brundig founded Pandora Film, which was for 17 years a leading European distributor of international art-house films. The company established its reputation distributing highly ambitious arthouse films from Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Gianni Amelio, Theo Angelopoulus, Sergei Bodrov, Niki Caro, Jane Campion, Leos Carax, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jaco Van Dormael, Kim Ki Duk, Atom Egoyan, Stephen Frears, Jean-Luc Godard, Yilmaz Güney, Michael Haneke, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jim Jarmusch, Chen Kaige, Aki Kaurismäki, Bakhtiar Khudojnazarov, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Akira Kurusawa, Emir Kusturica, Paul Leduc, Ang Lee, Mike Leigh, Mira Nair, Sally Potter, Alain Resnais, Jan Schütte, Alain Tanner, Andrej Tarkowski, Lars von Trier, Wim Wenders, Wayne Wang and many others.

In 1996 Karl Baumgartner established with his partner Ernst Szebedits Pegasos Film Distribution in order to promote documentaries and feature films from the periphery of the world.