DIRECTOR'S NOTES

The only criminal act in art is to produce a world of objective moral values, where “good” and ”bad” are facts, which imperatively define the Happy End. My aim is to film a subjective SCHNEEBALL-world which could exist that way or exists already, without making the desire noticeable that I wished myself a better one.

Unscrupulousness, corruption, cynicism are terms to which we need to get accustomed to. They are the outstanding characteristics of our consumer society. We applaud or condemn them, depending upon our personal advantage.

We live in a virtual world where nothing is as it seems to be. The flowers, which we give to our dearest ones, the wreaths with which we decorate their graves are artificially coloured and contaminated with poisoning preservatives. The vitality and eternal youth of our idols are sputtered with hormone preparations and silicone. Our everyday life highlight is the Daily Soap and our most painful experience the defeat of our favourite soccer team.

We identify ourselves with the virtual heroes on the screen and define ourselves by the means of status symbols. We are more interested in the retouched crinkles on the ass of a Tv-Diva than in the deepest furrows of a philosopher, who despairs of the “Zeitgeist”. We love big gestures and theatrical tirades. Our heroes are crowd attracting actors, our prophets are PR- Agents. We live in a world of impostors such as Schneider, Schmieder or Becks, eating from the same golden dishes of corruption like their accomplices in politics. With the same appetite but worse table manners.

SCHNEEBALL begins above the vertex of an enforced dream, which changes into a nightmare. The clearly structured, purchasable world of profit and power is about to collapse and appears unmanageable. Ghosts of paranoia and fear of the descent from the deceitful paradise of the fraud are noticeable from the beginning. They get visible in the physiognomies and bearing of the protagonist. They are related to Manni Becks as Hyde is related to Jekyll or Mephisto to Faust. They determine his self-assessment and his behavior. They manipulate him like a string puppet in a surreal theatre of horror, in which the maxims of ethics succumb to the lies of self overestimation. From the first scene on one can sense the morning after the feast, the sudden awakening into a nightmare of hopeless reality.