Die Schneider Krankheit (2008)

Interesting facts

• Budget: €9K

Die Schneider Krankheit is a 2008 Spanish short science fiction mockumentary film written, directed, and produced by Javier Chillon, with brief animated sequences by Alicia Manero. Chillon's first film was shot on black and white Super 8 film, with a Spanish-language voice-over dubbed over another German one. With credits and most other onscreen text in German, the short film gives the impression of being a West German educational documentary film of the 1950s or 1960s. Its subject is the effect of an extraterrestrial plague brought to Earth by a Soviet chimpanzee cosmonaut after its capsule crash landed near the border with East Germany in 1958.

Production

Chillon originally intended to set the film in France, but quickly realised that the story ought to take place in Germany, which has always been the country of "mad doctors" in popular culture, and moreover, the Cold War-era Partition provided an excellent context.

Chillon financed the two-and-a-half-year project himself for €9000, obtaining various elements for free or cheaply through his family connections or friends: for example, the film's art director, his cousin, together with another friend who is a theatre set designer, were able to get the hospital beds for free from rental companies in Madrid, and all the sets were mounted in the loft of a friend's house.

The approximately fifty or so non-professional actors who appear in the film were friends, or friends of friends, or parents of friends, and his own father, Javier Chillon, Sr. Even so, they were carefully cast: mainly Spanish, they had to look like Germans of the 1950s, to move and act like the people from the old documentaries, just doing their work, often oblivious to the camera. Chillon obsessed over that aspect.

Most of Chillon's small crew were made up of either members of his family or friends: his father (a painter and sculptor) worked alongside his mother in special effects; his cinematographer Luis Fuentes is a close friend, while make-up was done by a friend who is a professional make-up artist and hairdresser.

It was important to Chillon to pay attention to the smallest details and create the right atmosphere; the individual elements (wardrobe, sets, actors, and so on) would only work when presented through the correct production values. For the most part the sets such as the tiled walls and floors, microscopes, hospital room, had to be constructed.

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