Pavel Schnabel

Annual awarding of the Grimme Awards.

Dennis, an American private eye, is sent to Germany to find out as much as possible about typical Germans and typically German behaviour. Disguised as a TV reporter he sets sail for Germany where we follow him interviewing a wide variety of people, from politicians and intellectuals to policemen, demonstrants and ordinary people in the street. All this, however, is not what the film is really about, for "Deckname Dennis" is actually a satirical documentary about all those extremely odd people, groups and societies whose attitudes and behaviour are far too outrageous for anybody to take seriously. Therefore ALL the documentary bits are real, i.e. the people really thought they were being interviewed by an American reporter, and so they gladly presented an insight into their beliefs, ideas and goals.

Marion is pregnant, but she doesn't know by whom. Three men come into question, all of whom will die sooner or later in the course of the movie. Just like all of us - as an announcement at the beginning of the film announces to the audience. The semi-documentary and fragmentarily narrated film leads via various paths and detours to the river that gives the film its title.

A short documentary on German early aviation innovator Gustav Mesmer.

No description available.

A film about soccer without a ball and without players ... The film gives a description of the preventive measures taken by the police to cope with a huge crowd attending a popular spectacle. It deliberately and almost completely dispenses with verbal statements, allowing atmosphere and original sound to speak for themselves. The clip-clop of (police) horses' hooves, the sound of the engines of police vehicles, of helicopters and water cannons, of walkie-talkies as well as video camera surveillance and the distribution of truncheons on the one hand, and the heaving crowd of fans, their pleasure, their disappointment, their shouts of support. The chronological record of a - peaceful - day of soccer does not apportion blame, without comment and stimulates discussion weather the "special police assignment" is really necessary. —JK

Documentary about a small German village and its inhabitants four decades after the last remaining jewish inhabitants were chased away or put into concentration camps. Interviews with the people of the village about the past as well as with the exiled jewish community, now living in New York.

Pavel Schnabel travelled to Weimar in 1988 on behalf of German regional public broadcaster SWR, to film a news feature on the city partnership between Trier and Weimar. He was assigned four "production assistants" from Eastern German television who introduced him to hand-picked protagonists for his film. After the fall of the Wall, Schnabel went to see these individuals again under radically altered circumstances.

Drama about the life of a few working class Germans.

No description available.

A Polish man and a Latin American woman fall in love in a Swiss asylum seekers' shelter and overcome their initial integration problems together. However, the authorities refuse to grant them asylum, and after the birth of their child, the father is deported.

No description available.

No description available.

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In his last reportage shortly before his death, the 'roving reporter' Egon Erwin Kisch followed the traces of Karl Marx's stays at the spa with loving nostalgia. But this short film, shot in the mid-1980s, could not ignore the discrepancy between the teachings of the 'great socialist' and their realization!