""Planeta Alemania - observations from invisibility"

1999, dogfilm & compañer@s for ZDF / ARTE, Betacam SP, 38 min.

"Planeta Alemania" is the attempt to make a cinematic portrait of a woman, who is not able to position herself in front of the camera. "It is like being constantly on the run. We live practically like criminals without having committed any crime." In Germany are many people living and working without a status of legal residence, "without papers". From television we know them as "illegal people": made unrecognizable or degraded to "shadow people", equally as victims and suspects.
Within talks / audio recordings over several months we have, together with our protagonist, developed the drama structure for this film, from which the concept of images resulted.
Fragmentary, in different tableaus, an image of a person comes into being, without her actually leaving invisibility. Her analysis, her dreams, her expectations and her thoughts enable us to take a different point of view onto the "Planeta Alemania".

Concerning the directors: "Planeta Alemania" was realized through all phases as a cooperation between filmmakers, translator and the protagonist. Although herself being a journalist, she is for obvious reasons not able to sign this half-year-work with her name. Therefore we have decided to have the credits without personal names and to label the authorship through our filmmakers group dogfilm.

no human is illegal