Christian Jungen was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 1973 and studied Italian language and literature, history and film. He completed his doctorate with a dissertation titled “Hollywood in Canne$: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship,” which received a quality award from the German Publishers and Booksellers Association and was published as a book in Germany, Holland and the USA. He has also lectured on the history of film festivals at the Free University of Berlin and at the Ruhr University in Bochum.

Jungen came to film when he was hired as a cashier at the then-new Loge cinema in Winterthur in 1991 (he was employed by art patron and film producer George Reinhart) and was thus able to watch the films for free. At the same time, he began working as a film critic for Radio Eulach and the newspaper Landbote in 1994 and founded a Ciné-Club, which existed for over 10 years, as well as the Critics Academy at the Locarno Film Festival together with the people of Ticino. In total, Jungen worked as a film critic for 25 years at publications Blick, TR7/TV Star, Aargauer Zeitung and, for the last 10 years, at NZZ am Sonntag, where he was head of culture for two years. In 2011, he won the Prix Pathé for film journalism. From 2011 to 2017, he was president of the Swiss Association of Film Journalists and is a member of the Zurich Film Commission and of the European Film Academy.

In April 2019, it was announced that Jungen would succeed Karl Spoerri as artistic director of the Zurich Film Festival in 2020. To do so, he gave up his position as head of culture at NZZ am Sonntag. Under his leadership, the Zurich Film Festival became the largest film festival in Switzerland in 2024 with 140,000 visitors. Since 2025 he is the festival director of ZFF, responsible for the programme as well as the business management.

On his initiative, the Zurich Film Festival 2023 took over the bankrupt cinema Kosmos on Europaallee in Zurich and reopened it with the 19th ZFF in 2023 under the name Frame. The name is a tribute to the film magazine of the same name founded by Jungen, but also refers to the fact that in the cinema, films are placed in a frame by means of introductions. The year-round programme of the six cinema screens reflects the DNA of the ZFF, showing a mix of upmarket mainstream titles, arthouse productions, documentaries and Swiss films.