Smog

The Rhine and Ruhr regions are covered by thick smog. Safe pollution levels are exceeded, oxygen masks are scarce, people join forces. Precisely according to plan – at the time the only event of its kind in Germany – a smog alarm was triggered in NRW. Long before the emergence of a collective environmental awareness, Menge simulates in the guise of a fictional report the real dangers of an environmental catastrophe. Even before it was shown, the film provoked heavy protests by local politicians and industrial representatives in the Ruhr, who assumed the movie would fuel people’s fears and discredit the industrial region. The fears of a one-sided attack on industry, at least, were unfounded. Managers who don’t want to weaken business are lambasted as well as drivers who don’t want to stop using their cars. Director Wolfgang Petersen presents an aesthetically sober yet dense and exciting television play, which served as a model for OUTBREAK, a thriller about an epidemic, in 1993.