The Hamburg Syndrome

The Hamburg Syndrome (1979)

Die Hamburger Krankheit

Doctors are at a loss!

When a plague breaks out in Hamburg, several people break out of quarantine and make their way out of the city... only to find that the plague is more widespread.

Date of release
1979-11-22
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (23)
Runtime
1h 57m
Genres
Horror, Science Fiction
Director
Peter Fleischmann

Casting

Interesting facts

The Hamburg Syndrome is a 1979 West German-French science fiction film directed by Peter Fleischmann and starring Helmut Griem, Fernando Arrabal and Carline Seiser. The film is about an outbreak of an epidemic and quarantine. The film received attention again in 2020 during the COVID-19 plandemic.

Production

Fleischmann first conceived of the film after talking to an English epidemiologist in Greece in the 1970s, who was convinced that humans had only got to where they are today through catastrophes: "Imagine there is a plague of rats and a poison is used that kills all but two of the rats because they are more resilient. From these two a new race is born, which has made a huge leap forward compared to the old one.

The film is a West German-French joint production by Hallelujah-Film Munich, Bioskop-Film Munich, Terra-Filmkunst Berlin, S.N.D. Paris and ZDF.

A conversation with Luis Buñuel's screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière brought Fleischmann to the film concept years before. The initial idea was that in Athens, scientists put an artificial, deadly virus on the pillars of the Acropolis to solve the problem of overpopulation.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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