Making of

In 2003, the German Olympic Committee organised a national competition between five German cities and regions to bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Leipzig was one of the cities invited, but was only met with pitying smiles from the bidding cities in the west, especially the favourite Hamburg. The Abold agency, which had already designed the stadiums for the World Cup in South Africa, commissioned the production company Wolff Brothers to develop and produce an image film for the final presentation. I came into the picture as director via the Wolff Brothers.

The original idea was to film the organisational concept of the Olympic bid and to underlay it with some beautiful images of Leipzig. Unfortunately, film is not particularly suitable for this. Such information films tend to be somewhat boring. Organisational charts are best put into brochures, then you can take your time to look at them. It was also clear that our main competitor, Hamburg, was sending star director Dieter Wedel into the race and giving him all the artistic freedom and a generous budget.

Our budget was comparatively modest. We were the underdog that nobody expected. As the competition was tough and we didn’t know what Wedel was doing in Hamburg, we focused from the start on what film does best: Emotion. And since we only had one shot, we immediately played with the big emotion orchestra. The really big one.

The Leipzig Olympic film therefore doesn’t try to visualise numbers and the Olympic organisation at all – but rather to emotionally capture the city itself and its spirit. We also took a broad sweep through the city’s recent history. The demonstrations against the GDR regime began with the legendary Leipzig Monday demonstrations – so the Olympic film begins with the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall. Lord Mayor Wolfgang Tiefensee agreed to come on stage with his cello and play “Dona Nobis Pacem” by the Leipzig composer Johann Sebastian Bach live in front of a projection of the Wall – a song that “carried” the citizens of Leipzig during the peaceful revolution, as Tiefensee put it.

The film continued in this style. Richard von Weizsäcker and Hans-Dietrich Genscher spoke about the courage and strong morale of the people of Leipzig, star architect Peter Eisenman about the likeable idea of building mobile stadiums, and Leipzig residents Kathi Witt and Michael Ballack about the enthusiasm for sport in the city.

During our research on site, the enthusiasm for the Olympic project was palpable. I turned this experience into a figure and sent a symbolic Olympia through the city, which further fuelled this emotion and which half the city joined in at the end, accompanied by Beehoven’s “Ode to Joy”.