Helen Dorn: Prague Embassy

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Episode of the series Helen Dorn
Original title Prague embassy
Country of production Germany
original language German
Production
company		 Network Movie
length 89 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
classification Episode 10 ( list )
German-language
first broadcast		 December 1, 2018 on ZDF
Rod
Director Alexander Dierbach
script Florian Oeller
production Jutta Lieck-Klenke
Dietrich Kluge
music Wolfram de Marco
camera Ian Blumers
cut Simon Blasi
occupation
chronology

←  Predecessor
shadow of the past

Successor  →
After the storm

Prague Embassy is a German television film by Alexander Dierbach from 2018. It is the 10th episode of the ZDF crime series Helen Dorn with Anna Loos in the title role .

action

Commissioner Helen Dorn is to be transferred to the office, as she is extremely weak mentally after her last assignment. In order to avoid this, she gets involved in a case that BKA officer Felix Schwarz brings to her. A fisherman had fished a message in a bottle over two years old from the Elbe, which Schwarz believes came from the IT millionaire Westerberg, who disappeared in Prague. According to calculations of the flow velocity and the course of the river, a bottle would actually take two years from the Vltava in Prague to Hamburg. The only question is whether the sender is still alive. Together, Dorn and Schwarz set out for Prague to track down Westerberg.

Her search for traces not only takes her back two years, but even further into the past. In August 1989, when the German Embassy in Prague was a refuge for thousands of refugees, whom the then Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher was able to inform after long negotiations with the GDR government that their departure to West Germany had been approved, Paul Westerberg was among them Seized chance to leave his country and start afresh elsewhere. He did not shy away from stealing from the GDR citizen Rudi Späth and getting a better start with the money he had saved from the West . Little did he suspect that this act had robbed the man of any prospects for the future. While Späth was imprisoned for drug trafficking and homicide, he learned the name of the thief from a television interview. Then in 2008 he died of cancer.

In revenge for her father, his daughter Franka, an employee of the German Embassy in Prague, kidnapped him in 2014 when Westerberg returned to Prague as a successful entrepreneur after the fall of the Berlin Wall to take part in a technology congress. However, she had first made contact a few weeks earlier at an embassy reception on "25 Years of the Prague Embassy". For this reason, a review of the congress participants in 2014 did not yield anything, as Franka had not been there but contacted him by phone later that day.

Westerberg was to suffer as much as Späth. His hostage should last as long as Späth's prison sentence and end with his death. While Helen Dorn, Felix Schwarz and their Czech colleagues manage to end Westerberg's martyrdom and he can be successfully freed, the Commissioner herself has to accept a private disaster. Her father was attacked in his house by the hostage taker Franka and is critically injured in the clinic after falling down stairs. It is unclear if he will ever wake up from a coma.

background

Shooting for the Prague Embassy took place from October 16 to December 15, 2017 in Cologne , Düsseldorf and Prague . This tenth episode of the series as been sent ZDF - Saturday thriller .

reception

Audience rating

The first broadcast of the Prague Embassy on December 1, 2018 on ZDF only reached 4.80 million viewers and a market share of 16.7 percent. This is the worst value since the start of the crime series.

criticism

Harald Keller from tittelbach.tv said: “With the film 'Prague Embassy', the 'Helen-Dorn' series catches up with modern television aesthetics. Author Oeller and director Alexander Dierbach opted for a discontinuous, elliptical narrative style with various leaps in time that go beyond the purely explanatory flashback function - here the ideal form for a multi-perspective treatment of the topic of guilt and atonement. Oeller and Dierbach also blur the boundaries between reality and inner perception in some sequences. In Germany, such a dramaturgy may still be considered extravagant, elsewhere it is very well established and is expected of a wide audience. "Keller, on the other hand, critically stated:" The main character Helen Dorn remains problematic. In general, the cliché that female investigators are characterized as bulky, unfriendly, psychologically ailing. "For Helen Dorn, he said," the point has been reached at some point where the figure is reduced to its ability to suffer and the principle becomes a ploy . "

The TV Spielfilm editorial team gave the crime thriller a “thumbs up” and wrote: “Only the sticky music is cheeky, otherwise the triangular drama remains pleasantly discreet against the historical background.” Conclusion: “Dramatic and pleasantly kitsch-free.”

Tilmann P. Gangloff wrote for the Frankfurter Rundschau and said: “The quality of the film is evident not least from the script details, in addition to the exceptionally good performance and the successful integration of the flashbacks. The fact that the abductee was able to attract attention at all is thanks to the Vltava flood in 2016; It took his message in a bottle two years until it finally reached the sea. ”He went on to say:“ With all due respect for Düsseldorf, Prague is [...] a much more illustrious location than Dorn's usual territory. In addition, it is always fruitful when loners have to come to terms with a coercive partner, which doesn't prevent Helen Dorn from doing her thing in the Czech capital as well and regularly leaving her colleague Schwarz. "

In Quotenmeter.de Julian Miller evaluated very negative and called this crime series "failed". “Prague Embassy” “can't really please except for a few passages. The historical events only form the background for a banal and clichéd plot about a love triangle and a traitor - that's all you can get out of the film. The potential for conflict, which is available in abundance with such a material, was not used in favor of a run-of-the-mill plot. You see again and again how tents are pitched and you hear in dialogues that supplies are running out. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Filming locations at crew-united.com, accessed on April 6, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b Harald Keller: Loos, Stötzner, Oeller, Dierbach. On the way to the pain woman of the Saturday crime film criticism at tittelbach.tv, accessed on April 6, 2019.
  3. ↑ TV Spielfilm : TV political drama about the moving events in September 1989 at TV Spielfilm.de , accessed on April 6, 2019.
  4. ↑ Tilmann P. Gangloff: Prague Embassy at fr.de, accessed on April 6, 2019.
  5. ↑ Julian Miller: criticism at Quotenmeter.de , accessed on 6 April of 2019.