Hansel | Gretel | Phase 3

H | G | PHASE 3 is based on the real historical crimes in the late 1980s, when pharmaceutical companies, with the help of the “Commercial Coordination” department and the State Security, conducted drug trials on GDR clinics and GDR citizens.

Cardiovascular drugs and antidepressants (e.g. Brofaromin) were tested without the knowledge of the test patients. We dramatise this chapter of East/West biopolitics, we smell the chemical connections between West Germany and the GDR, we explore the political and emotional risks and side effects of the time shortly before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

H | G | PHASE 3 is surreal true-crime and a chemical political fairy tale: in the bodies of the patients, capitalism and the surveillance state shake hands.

The pharmaceutical giant brings depression and antidepressants to the East. Socialism mutates into a laboratory with side effects. Betrayal of the protected. Symptoms, Placebo and side effects are exported to the West as ideal goods.

Those treated with antidepressants eventually bring about the turnaround. The Stasi witch ends up in the oven, and at some point you always see each other again. We plumb this political, chemical and emotional abyss of the 1980s.

It is about that consolation which the financial compensation of the victims by companies like Hoechst, Ciba-Geigy and Bayer, which has not been paid so far, will not give sufficiently.