ARCHIVE

A film by Valentin Thurn
A co-production with SCHNITTSTELLE KÖLN

First broadcast: 20.10.2010, 23:30, ARD
Repetition: 06.08.2015, Phoenix

Supported by MEDIA (EU Commission), Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst (EED), KOCCA (Korean film funding).
Editorial staff: Angelika Wagner (WDR), Andrea Ernst (WDR), Dirk Neuhoff (NDR) and Babeth Vanloo (BOS)
The international version (55 minutes) ran in the Netherlands (BOS), Sweden (SVT), Ireland (TG4), Spain (TV3), Lithuania (LVT), Finland (YLE), Switzerland (TSR), Norway (NRK), Cyprus (CYBC), Greece (ERT), South Korea (CREO) and in other countries (list to be updated).

The short version (29 minutes) ran on WDR television under the title "Essen im Eimer" on 25.10.2010 and on NDR television on 26.10.2010

More than half of our food ends up in the trash! Most of it already on its way from the field to the store before it even reaches our dining table: every second head of lettuce, every second potato and every fifth loaf of bread. That corresponds to about 500,000 truckloads per year. Director Valentin Thurn has researched the extent of this waste internationally - in the waste containers of wholesale markets, warehouses and supermarkets. He has documented overwhelming quantities of perfect food, some of it still in its original packaging, often with a valid best-before date. Up to 20 million tons of food are thrown away each year in Germany alone. And it is becoming more and more!
In his search for the causes, Valentin Thurn talks to supermarket managers, bakers, wholesale market inspectors, ministers, farmers and EU politicians.
What he finds is a worldwide system in which everyone participates. Everything should be available at all times, supermarkets offer the full range of goods throughout, bread must be fresh on the shelves until late in the evening, there are strawberries in every season. And everything has to look perfect: A wilted lettuce leaf, a crack in the potato, a dent in the apple - the goods are sorted out immediately. Yogurt pots end up in the trash two days before their best-before date expires.
The fact that half of the food already produced becomes waste has a devastating effect on the world's climate. Agriculture gobbles up huge amounts of energy, water, fertilizer, pesticides and clears rainforest, accounting for more than a third of greenhouse gases. When food rots in landfills, additional methane gas escapes, which has 25 times the impact on global warming as carbon dioxide.
Consumers' desire to have everything at their disposal at any time also exacerbates global hunger. Rising wheat prices prove it: today, industrialized countries buy their food on the world market, as do developing countries. If we threw away less, we would have to buy less; prices would fall and there would be more for the hungry.
But there is another way: Valentin Thurn finds people around the world who try to stop the insane waste: so-called garbage divers who rescue food from the waste containers of supermarkets, supermarket directors who convince their customers to buy less climate-damaging products, consumer associations that bring farmers and customers directly together. Small steps, but they could make a big difference: If we cut food waste in the industrialized countries by just half, it would have the same effect on the world's climate as if we gave up every second car.

A film by Britta Dombrowe
On behalf of ZDF
First broadcast: 08.10.2010, 22:40, ARTE

Statistically, they do not exist, the intersexuals. In the birth certificate must be entered within the first week after birth: Boy or girl - otherwise it is not issued at all. And without the birth certificate there is no passport, no child benefit, no school enrollment. In the case of ambiguous genitalia, many doctors advise gender reassignment surgery. The problem with this is that no one can predict what the child will later feel like: As a man or as a woman?
During the pregnancy, Andrea and her husband Nico agreed: "Whether it will be a boy or a girl didn't matter to us. That it could be both at the same time, we never thought of that!" Three months early, their baby is born. "At delivery, the midwife told me it was a little boy!" recalls Andrea, "then when my husband came to the hospital, the doctor told him it was a little girl!" Her child has a vagina, a uterus, testicles located in the abdomen and a small penis. Tests show that the sex chromosomes have an XY, meaning they are male.
But a person's biological sex can be read at several levels: through the chromosomes, hormones and sex organs. In normal development, these factors coincide; in intersexuality, they contradict each other. There are over 25 different diagnoses and every 5000th to 3000th newborn is affected.

Only in the last few years science has started to research the causes and effects of intersexuality at full speed: The new technical term is now DSD - Disorder of Sexual Development. It is high time, because since the 1950s medicine has been following the theses of the American psychologist John Money, who considered upbringing alone to be the decisive factor. So that the surrounding field can make however a clear sex-specific education, the child needs a clear body: Infants come on the operating table.
With the help of the surgery can be taken away, which is too much or be added missing. Hormone therapy does the rest. But often in the parforceride to the sexual unambiguity the signs are not read correctly or not recognized at all. Who wants to decide on the sex of infants if it is not foreseeable how they will later feel and develop as adolescents? How they want to live?
Even findings from brain research are not yet taken into account. But especially in the case of an intersexual genital, the brain provides important clues, according to brain researcher Dirk Swaab: "You have to wait until the brain starts to work in a sexually differentiated way. Only from the behavior of a person can we deduce whether he has a male or female brain."
The intersexual Christiane Völling (50) has suffered for decades from the discrepancy between body and feelings. At birth, the girl was assigned to the male sex due to an enlarged clitoris. Hormone treatment with testosterone followed. The subsequent removal of her uterus and ovaries were sold to her as tumor removal. Only thirty years after the operation does she learn from the files that she was deprived of her femininity at that time. In 2008, she sues her former surgeon - the court case attracts attention.

Inge's parents are fortunate that they have not been pressured by doctors to have "gender reassignment" surgery. They want to delay the decision as long as possible:
"We are raising our little Inge as a girl, but it may well be that she will become more of a young man during puberty, when her male gonads start working. We try to raise her as normally as possible. I do have some reservations about pink dresses. I always think, maybe she wants to live as a man later and then pictures in such an outfit are certainly embarrassing for her."
The documentary by filmmaker Britta Julia Dombrowe approaches the lives of those affected in intensive interviews and at the same time shows the current state of research: a French surgeon who operates on children for uniqueness explains his motivation to "save" the children from a cruel society. Inge's teacher tells us how the children deal with the fact that Inge is a boy and a girl. New findings from brain research make it clear: gender is created in the brain and not between the legs.
We know little about the lives of intersexuals, but also about how they are treated in science and medicine. That there is much more than man and woman, that is what this film is about.

A film by Valentin Thurn
As part of the Arte theme evening "Crime Scene Hospital".

First broadcast: 20.04.2010, 21:15, ARTE
Link to ARD report

Many movie fans celebrated Gérard Depardieu's son Guillaume as the greatest up-and-coming talent in French cinema. But things turned out differently. In 1995, the 24-year-old had to undergo knee surgery after a motorcycle accident. During the operation, the hospital germ MRSA penetrated the wound. There was no definitive cure, neither through 17 operations nor by means of antibiotics. Finally, in 2003, Guillaume Depardieu made a tough decision. To put an end to his unbearable pain, he had his right leg amputated.
In the fight against the killer germs, the actor founded the "Guillaume Depardieu Foundation" and drew attention to untenable conditions in French hospitals on talk shows. He threatened the health minister with a "crusade" if the government did not take action against the conditions in the hospitals. He soon found that the mass of inquiries overwhelmed him. He handed over his life's work to the patient protection association "Lien" and concentrated on his career. While he was filming in Romania, he fell ill with pneumonia. Suddenly, everything happened very quickly. On October 13, 2008, Guillaume Depardieu died at the age of 37.
What is his legacy? His angry appearances on television raised public awareness of the danger of antibiotic-resistant germs in France and created political pressure. The Ministry of Health, previously reluctant to publish figures on the problem, changed course in 2003. Since then, the diseases have been recorded and published nationwide. And patients can find out how active their hospital is in the fight against the killer germs.

Today, the reform is having an impact: France is the only European country to have reduced the number of infected patients over the past five years, while elsewhere the killer germs continue to spread in hospitals.

In his documentary, filmmaker Valentin Thurn lets Guillaume Depardieu's ex-wife Elise have her say. In addition, friends and colleagues express their views. The actor himself is present in numerous archive shots from documentaries and feature films.

A film by Valentin Thurn
A co-production with SCHNITTSTELLE KÖLN
Commissioned by WDR

First broadcast: 13.09.2009, 16:25, WDR
Link to the Whistleblower Network

"My loyalty to the constitution takes precedence over my loyalty to my boss," Rudolf Schmenger decides on August 30, 2001.
Until then, he is an efficient tax investigator, repeatedly commended by his employer, the Frankfurt tax office. On his behalf, he also searches a major bank and tracks down tax evaders who are smuggling millions into accounts abroad. Without giving any reasons, his employer forbids him to pursue these "cases" further. A presumably politically motivated instruction from the Hessian Ministry of Finance, because the investigations in the banks have a negative impact on the state as a business location.
"It can't be that we hang the small tax evaders and let the big ones go," says Rudolf Schmenger. But in the end, the Ministry of Finance orders the dissolution of his department.
Rudolf Schmenger resists - until the office management finally finds a way to get rid of him via a commissioned expert opinion: A psychiatrist certifies Rudolf Schmenger a "querulatory development" and writes him "life-long unfit for service".
Against his will, he is sent into early retirement in his early 40s. In the meantime, the Hessian Medical Association accuses the psychiatrist of having prepared a favorable opinion in the interest of the state government. Rudolf Schmenger fights for his reputation and continues to rally civil servants around him who, like him, want to follow their conscience.
tag7 rolls up the case of "Schmenger" in an exemplary report and asks what enables this man to put his ethical principles above his personal career despite fierce opposition.

A film by Valentin Thurn

First broadcast: 01.07.2009, 23:30, ARD

Link to the website of Harry Wörz
Link to the song of Nadeem

It is the nightmare par excellence, the day with which everything in life changes: The day when 'In the name of the people' a judge pronounces guilt. The convicted person knows he didn't do it - but no one believes him. Even the German criminal justice system, despite all the rules, all the instances, is not immune to errors. And, still worse: Who gets once into the mills of the justice, has hardly chances to come out again.
One of these rare cases is Harry Wörz (41) from Birkenfeld with Pforzheim. He allegedly strangled his ex-wife with a scarf in 1997. The victim has been a nursing case since then because of brain damage and can no longer testify. She was a police officer. Also under suspicion were her lover and her father, both also police officers. But for the police it is quickly clear that Harry Wörz is the culprit. He is not a police officer. The court followed the investigators' view and sentenced Harry Wörz to eleven years in prison in a circumstantial trial. In a later civil trial, however, which was about compensation for damages, the judges ruled that he could not be the perpetrator. They criticized that the criminal trial had 'not been objective in some points'. Wörz then tried to have the case reopened, which he actually succeeded in doing three years later. With success: acquittal by the Mannheim Regional Court. But a year later, in October 2006, the Federal Court of Justice overturned the acquittal. The follow-up trial began a few weeks ago and is scheduled to run throughout 2009.
90 percent of all miscarriages of justice are due to misidentification. That's because judges increasingly rely on expert witnesses. But they have been under heavy criticism for some time. A very serious error of such an expert has Donald Stellwag (50) for alleged bank robbery innocently behind bars. The expert had identified him 'beyond doubt' on a photo taken by the surveillance camera at the scene of the crime. Donald Stellwag tried to get a retrial - in vain. He served the full nine years, and was denied early release because he did not confess. Less than two weeks after he was released from prison, police caught the real culprit in a new bank robbery.

Unusual: In 2007, the expert was ordered by the Frankfurt/Main Higher Regional Court to pay 150,000 euros in damages for pain and suffering - the first case in which an expert has ever been held liable for an erroneous court opinion. The court-appointed counter-expert, Prof. Friedrich Wilhelm Rösing, criticized the fact that there are numerous incorrect verdicts due to the poor quality of surveillance cameras and the insufficient knowledge of many experts.
Rösing is now again the counter-expert in a current case: Andreas Kühn has been in the Heimsheim correctional facility near Stuttgart for almost nine years. He is said to be the so-called 'gorilla mask robber' who held up four banks in Stuttgart in the 1990s. Kühn maintains his innocence. The court based its conviction on several pieces of circumstantial evidence. The decisive factor was a photo from a surveillance camera. The expert witness at the trial - a retired police officer - said at the time that he could not rule out Kühn as the perpetrator. But Professor Wilhelm Rösing is convinced: Kühn cannot be the bank robber. The expert for facial recognition found 25 features on the pictures that do not match the convicted man - already with 3 features one could say that the picture does not show the person in question. Based on this expert opinion, Kühn is pursuing the reopening of his case. A laborious, agonizing process full of uncertainties and with an open outcome.

A film by Kadriye Acar and Valentin Thurn
Commissioned by NDR

First broadcast: 10.05.2009, 17:30, ARD
Link to ARD Theme Week

"If I had met Inge earlier, I would have become a more self-confident person. Many things would have been easier. I trust her more than other people because her help is voluntary and therefore comes from the heart," says 27-year-old Öznur Demir. She had been looking for help to complete her secondary school diploma - and found 69-year-old retiree Inge Alexy, at the "Senioren-Lotsen" project. The volunteer mentor helps the young Turkish woman learn German and find an apprenticeship.
There are currently thirty such senior pilots in Lübeck, and more are joining them at every meeting. Not only the young foreigners benefit, but also the seniors who want to do something useful in their retirement. A model project that so far only exists in Lübeck.

The volunteer "pilots" cannot replace the professionals at the counseling centers. But they can also provide moral support to young people when they find themselves in a desperate situation, like the 17-year-old Kurd Faysal Idris, who fled to Germany when he was 14. "Without Mr. Pawlowski," he said, "I wouldn't even have a roof over my head. I can't express it in words, but it's the most important person for me in Lübeck." Former teacher Jürgen Pawlowski came to Lübeck himself as a refugee after World War 2. He knows the feeling of being a stranger in a country. That's why he wants to help Faysal feel at home in Lübeck.

A film by Valentin Thurn and Sabine Goette

First broadcast: 19.12.2008, 22:35, ARTE

2009 ARGUS Foundation Journalism Award for Antibiotic Preservation and Development
36th International Festival of Sustainable Development Films, Bratislava, Slovakia, 2009
International Science Film Festival, Athens, Greece, 2009

The global spread of new super-bacteria in hospitals is causing concern among doctors. The most widespread and dangerous of the hospital germs is called MRSA (multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). In Germany alone, 15,000 patients become infected every year, in France almost twice as many. MRSA is resistant to common antibiotics. And the germ is becoming more and more aggressive: the number of drugs that can still be used is decreasing from year to year. MRSA can lead to severe wound infections, pneumonia, sepsis and not infrequently death. Across Europe, around 50,000 people die every year from the killer germ.
Super germs like MRSA have been around for over 40 years, but in countries like Germany or France the problem was underestimated for a long time. As a result, the germ spread to such an extent that hospitals can hardly control it today. Even the strictest hygiene precautions cannot reduce the risk of infection during surgery to zero.
Since the discovery of penicillin, doctors have relied on antibiotics to effectively fight bacterial infections. But as soon as a new drug was invented, there were resistant strains of bacteria just a few years later. They have spread mainly in countries where antibiotics are used particularly liberally. In contrast, where they are more targeted and sparingly given, there are also fewer super germs.
The filmmakers Valentin Thurn and Sabine Goette pursue the question: What is being done in European hospitals to combat the spread of hospital germs? How have the Dutch managed to reduce the number of MRSA cases to almost zero? How do new germs spread against which no antibiotic can help anymore? What hope is there through research into vaccines? And: How do patients cope who were infected with a super germ in the hospital and will probably never get rid of it again?

A film by Britta Dombrowe and Valentin Thurn
A co-production with SCHNITTSTELLE KÖLN
Commissioned by WDR

First broadcast: 18.05.2008, WDR

"The bread here is 1 A!", says Hanna and she is absolutely right. It looks appetizing and is neatly wrapped in plastic foil. Nothing seems to distinguish it from the others on the supermarket shelf, except that the 21-year-old has just fished it out of the trash. Hanna has not been buying her food in supermarkets for a long time now, but gets it from the dumpsters behind them.
"Containerizing" is what it's called in the scene of self-proclaimed leftover recyclers who refuse to follow the consumer cycle of the throwaway society. Not out of necessity, but out of conviction.
There are no concrete figures on how much food is thrown away in Germany. At the Cologne wholesale market alone, up to ten tons accumulate on a normal market day. The reasons for this vary: sometimes the imprint on the label has slipped, sometimes the refrigeration during transport was not up to standard. Often, however, it is simply cheaper for wholesalers and retailers to throw away food and buy new than to rent storage space. "Then the whole stuff wanders into the garbage box by box," knows remnant recycler Jens from Cologne, who has meanwhile said goodbye to his former bourgeois life completely via "containerizing": "I don't have to bend for anyone, but this freedom can be quite hard."
We accompany remnant recyclers on their forays into "free land". What freedoms does their self-chosen life bring them and where do they encounter health, social and political limits?

A film by Valentin Thurn
Commissioned by WDR

First broadcast: 07.05.2008, 22:30 clock, Menschen hautnah, WDR
Link to the directory of German sperm banks

When Anna (28) learns from her mother that she was conceived with a sperm donation, she is initially paralyzed. For weeks she looks at the family photo albums, compares her face in the mirror with that of her father and sisters.
Anna's parents had separated eight years ago: to the social father Anna had since then only little contact. Her two younger sisters were born naturally, although a doctor had initially told the father that he was incapable of procreation. The parents had therefore sought the help of a sperm bank in Boston, USA, at the time.

Anna goes to Boston to look for her genetic father, or rather to find the "donor", because she avoids the word "father" in this context: "I already have a father!" The search is difficult because her mother Pauline had destroyed all the records at the time; after all, no one was supposed to know about the sperm donation. Realizing how important the "donor search" is to her daughter, and when Anna finds a possible donor through an Internet forum, her mother decides to go to Boston as well. They visit Randy, who had donated at the time Pauline was receiving treatment. After a very emotional conversation in his apartment, they take a saliva sample on a cotton swab . They have this examined at home in Munich in a gene laboratory. Anna learns the test result from the lab director in her search for her own identity....

A film by Valentin Thurn and Sabine Goette
Commissioned by ZDF in cooperation with ARTE

First broadcast: 27.11.2007, 21:40, ARTE

The invention of vaccines is one of the great success stories of medicine. Epidemics such as smallpox and polio, which terrified people for a long time, were defeated thanks to vaccinations. But the victories that have been won in the history of medicine have rarely been without undesirable side effects or even losses. Even though vaccines are many times safer today than they were 20 years ago, the possibility of vaccine damage still exists. The dangers from infectious diseases that can be prevented by vaccination are considered by experts to be much higher. The fatal consequences of measles are one example. And yet they are there: consequential damages that lead to disability or even death.
The filmmakers Valentin Thurn and Sabine Goette trace the bright and dark sides of vaccinations. A journey into the history of immunization paves the way to the fates of those affected, then and now, and to current, controversial debates about vaccination.

Families from Germany and France tell of both sides of the success coin: what can happen if vaccinations are not given, and how even one vaccination can dramatically change lives. Six-year-old Micha is doomed to die because he contracted measles at the age of 5 months in a pediatrician's office. It took years for the disease to break out: SSPE, a chronic brain inflammation and consequence of the measles, which certainly leads to death. Little Joel is also affected. During Germany's largest measles epidemic, which broke out in Duisburg in 2006, he also fell ill. He died while the shooting was still in progress. Madame Zanakolona from Paris, on the other hand, had to fight for years to have the brain damage that her now 15-year-old son suffered after a whooping cough vaccination recognized by the courts. The vaccine has long been off the market, but new vaccines with potential risks are pushing ahead. The Schomaker family, at any rate, is convinced that the six-dose vaccine, introduced 6 years ago, was to blame for their son's death.
Coroner Prof. Randolph Penning has performed autopsies on several children in recent years after six-dose vaccinations. Results: abnormal and worrisome brain swelling. The former employee of the Paul Ehrlich Institute and insider Dr. Klaus Hartmann is also extremely critical of the new combination vaccines. Are they to blame for the death of the children? No one has been able to prove it yet, but the controversy is on. How openly must possible consequential damage be reported without stirring up fear among parents and thus producing low vaccination rates and the return of epidemics?
Most infectious diseases have lost their threat, not least because of the success of vaccinations. Vaccinations therefore no longer seem so important to many. Some vaccines, however, would be welcomed by many people around the world. Like, for example, the new vaccine against tuberculosis being developed at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. Millions of people worldwide are affected by TB, and resistant pathogens are spreading more and more. Vaccination could provide a remedy, scientists hope. Because TB is still on the rise.

A film by Valentin Thurn and Britta Dombrowe
First broadcast: 02.09.2007, 16:25, WDR

For hours in November 2006, inmates tortured a 20-year-old fellow inmate in the youth prison Siegburg and finally killed him. The prison staff did not notice the hours-long ordeal. The crime threw a spotlight on the conditions in German youth prisons: Cells are overcrowded, there is an acute shortage of staff, prisoners are locked away for up to 23 hours a day and left to fend for themselves.
19-year-old Ufuk, who is serving time in Siegburg, the "toughest youth prison," as he puts it, also knows this. Ufuk knows what he's talking about; at 14, he already had 140 crimes to his credit, is a regular in German prisons and knows the rules behind the walls. "When you arrive in jail, the first thing they do is check you out. Either they have respect or you have to get respect. That's where the law of the fist alone applies." Yet the penal code states: "In the execution of the prison sentence, the prisoner should become capable of leading a life without crime in the future with social responsibility."
The film shows the causes of growing brutality behind bars and presents new ways in juvenile penal system.

A film by Valentin Thurn
Commissioned by ZDF in cooperation with ARTE

First broadcast: 06.02.2007, 20:40, theme night, ARTE

1001 Documentary Film Festival, Istanbul, 2008
Gold Panda Awards, International Sichuan TV Festival, China, 2007
E. Desmond Lee Africa World Festival, St. Louis, USA and Lagos, Nigeria, 2007
Film Festival Eberswalde - Die Provinziale, Germany, 2007: award for "best documentary"

Immigration brought female circumcision from Africa to Europe. But more and more black women decide, "Not with my daughter!" Three women from England, Germany and France tell of the day they were circumcised, of problems with urination and the pain of menstruation, the fear of sexual intercourse and childbirth. But there is hope: Dr. Pierre Foldes from Paris developed a technique with which he can restore the clitoris.
"Not with my daughter!" appears as a bonus track on the DVD of the feature film "Desert Flower" with Waris Dirie.

A film by Mauricio Estrella and Antonio Uscátegui
Co-writer: Valentin Thurn
Commissioned by WDR.

First broadcast: 19.11.2006, ARD

Abelardo lives illegally in Germany. He has no residence papers, is constantly on guard against the police. Abelardo does not want to return to Ecuador to the slums of the port city of Guayaquil. His mother still lives there; she is sick but does not have health insurance. Abelardo sends her money for medicine.
For six years he has been struggling to make ends meet in Germany. A life in the shadows, determined by the search for cheap jobs where no papers are required. Then he meets Ines, a German, at a dance, quite normal. They fall in love. But does Ines trust him, or does she feel used? As a means to an end, to get a residence permit through her?
Over a million foreigners live illegally in Germany, like Abelardo. For more than a year, Mauricio Estrella and Antonio Uscátegui observed two families for whom the daily game of hide-and-seek has become the norm for fear of deportation. As so-called "economic refugees", they bravely and also astonishingly normally master a life in which there is everything but security.

A film by Valentin Thurn, co-written by Stephan Müller
Commissioned by NDR in cooperation with ARTE

First broadcast: 29.08.2006, 20:40, ARTE

Nominated for the German Television Award for "Best Reportage"
International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film (DOK Leipzig), 2006
Basel_Karlsruhe Forum (BaKaFORUM), Basel, Switzerland, 2007
Gold Panda Awards, Sichuan TV Festival, China, 2007

Zacarias Moussaoui is the only assassin to stand trial for the attacks on September 11. September 2001 to stand trial - it was a symbolic trial for the United States. In May 2006, he was sentenced to life in prison. For the rest of his life, he is to have no outside contacts.
Is he the so-called 20th assassin to pilot a plane into the White House? Or just a mentally ill would-be conspirator? What is certain is that he was arrested four weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon while trying to learn how to fly a Boeing 747. And it is also certain that the FBI could have prevented the September 11 attacks had Moussaoui's notebook and laptop been searched in time.

How does a young Moroccan-born Frenchman end up joining al-Qaeda and training to become a suicide bomber in camps in Afghanistan? In his youth, he was not religious, he loved parties and his girlfriend, and sometimes he drank alcohol - until the day he was converted to jihad by radical Muslim preachers in London.
His mother Aïcha El-Wafi fought against the death penalty for her son during the trial. On the sidelines of the trials, she met Phyllis Rodriguez in the U.S., the mother of Greg, who was killed in the flames of the World Trade Center. In his documentary, filmmaker Valentin Thurn shows the development of this extraordinary friendship and gently traces the history of the dysfunctional Moussaoui family. Intense interviews with friends and family members, including the two Moussaouis sisters, are complemented by exclusive footage, some of which has never been shown before - including a private video of the teenage Zacarias.

On the fifth anniversary of the New York attacks, the film takes a new and unfamiliar look at a young Frenchman from Morocco whose difficult family background and influence from Islamist circles turned him into a death pilot who ultimately did not make it to the field. But it also sheds an illuminating light on Moussaoui's behavior during the trial, his guilty plea, which he has since recanted, as well as the role of justice in the U.S. and the desire of many Americans to convict the only assassin who confessed in court.

A film by Valentin Thurn
Commissioned by ZDF

First broadcast: 16.05.2006, 22:15, in the series "37°", ZDF

Surrogacy is forbidden - that's what the law says. But in the anonymity of the Internet, the black market is flourishing. There Hildegard and Anton come across Sarah. The conception of their child takes place in a toilet, with the help of an enema syringe. Hildegard and Anton tell no one, not even their parents. Quite secretly, the child is to be born.

Sarah, who receives a considerable amount of money for her surrogacy, also hides her pregnancy from her parents. She knows that her parents would never agree to it. Sarah tells them about the terms of the contract she negotiated with Anton and tries to suppress any emotional connection to the baby in her womb. It's not easy, after all, she is the baby's genetic mother. Finally the time has come, the delivery is imminent.
But when the longed-for phone call "The baby is here" arrives at Hildegard and Anton, a handover of the child does not take place. Hilde and Anton have obviously fallen victim to an impostor. It is never clarified whether Sarah wanted to keep her baby herself or sold it to another couple: the surrogate mother remains untraceable. Hildegard and Anton do not want to take such a risk of fraud again. They decide to look for a surrogate mother in Ukraine and find one in Kiev. In Ukraine surrogacy is allowed and there is a real surrogacy tourism. Ole and Ingrid also traveled to Kiev months ago to find a surrogate mother for their baby. The couple is convinced that they are doing nothing wrong.

In most surrogate motherhoods, the egg comes from a foreign woman, only the man is also the genetic father of the child through his sperm donation. With Ingrid and Ole it is different. The child is genetically entirely theirs, the surrogate mother has only carried it to term. At the notary's office, she assigns all rights to the baby to Ole and Ingrid. Overjoyed, Ole and Ingrid travel back to Germany with their child, who is still officially identified as their biological child on the spot.
Diana and Steffen find their surrogate mother in South Africa. There, too, surrogacy is legal, and the insemination is carried out in a clinic. Diana and Steffen are open about their planned surrogacy and have already told family, neighbors and work colleagues. They are convinced that the German youth welfare offices cannot do anything about it if they adopt the baby according to South African law.
"37º" tells about the three couples and asks about the responsibility for a child born through surrogacy. The child's identity can be a lifelong problem due to the knowledge of its different mothers.