Gladbeck, Germany, August 1988: Two gangsters rob a bank, take two bank employees hostage and embark on an odyssey across West Germany. As the hours turn into days they hijack a bus carrying almost thirty passengers.The police lose control of the situation while reporters get a whiff of a sensation and inject themselves into a crime that blossoms into a media event. For three days, the eyes and ears of the entire country are glued to live television, live radio and newspapers – and before it’s all over, three innocent people are dead.


GLADBECK:THE HOSTAGE CRISIS tells this gripping story exclusively using archive materials, including news, live reports, telephone recordings and amateur recordings made over the three days of the hostage rampage.The film is an unsparing look at the moment when news became merchandise and crime became spectacle - it marks the beginning of an era that persists today.

The story is told solely through the use of archival footage, with no posthumous ‘talking head’ narration or interviews.

To complement the novel approach of how the narrative is told, we created titles and imagery that fully immersed the viewer in the time and place. We decided to use fully analogue hardware distortions, rather than recreating it using modern software. This gave the imagery an authentic unpredictability, which fit perfectly with the quality of archival footage.