The series Bonn, helmed by award-winning director Claudia Garde, and counting six episodes, each one hour long, was shot in summer 2021, is now in post-production and is planned to be released in summer this year.

German public broadcaster WDR commissioned the production of the drama series, which is inspired by a historical background. Claudia Garde not only directed the six episodes of Bonn, but also wrote the screenplay, following an original idea by Gerrit Hermans. In doing so, she was assisted by two additional writers, Martin Rehbock (About a Girl [+lire aussi :
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Garde mainly works on television output. In her last 20 years of filmmaking, she has won several awards and is best known for her contribution to the famous crime series Tatort as well as for the psychological TV drama Die Frau am Ende der Straße, starring Maren Eggert. For her literary adaptation Das Nebelhaus and her drama Eine gute Mutter, she received the Bavarian Film Award for Best Director.

Bonn is inspired by true historical events. The title of the series refers to the German city that was the capital of West Germany before the reunification of the country in 1989. It was here, in the 1950s, that two German secret services held their meetings – namely, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Gehlen Organization, in which former Nazis fought for further influence behind the scenes and for the mobilisation of a secret army as a bulwark against the Russians. German chancellor Konrad Adenauer is supposed to have known about the existence of the latter one, and to have facilitated the integration of its members into the new Germany by keeping the process secret. This is a chapter and a reality of German history that has barely been addressed so far.

Set in 1954, the plot of the series focuses on the adventures of a young woman called Toni Schmidt. She comes back to her family after having spent some time abroad and finds a startling idyll shaped by the welfare generated by the German economic miracle that occurred during these years. Toni gets a job as a foreign-language secretary at the Gehlen Organization. After a while, she is approached by the director of the other, competing secret service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, who believes that several members of the Gehlen Organization are war criminals. He wants her to be a double agent and help pursue them.

Mercedes Müller (Freud, What Might Have Been [+lire aussi :
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interview : Johannes Naber
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interview : Annika Pinske
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Bonn is a production by Odeon Fiction, a LEONINE Studios company, in co-production with broadcaster WDR. It has been funded by the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, FilmFernsehFonds Bayern, German Motion Picture Fund (GMPF) and the Czech Film Fund. LEONINE will be in charge of its global distribution.

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