Berlin

From 1997 to 2004, Maximilian Stelzle lived in Berlin, where he was working as author and director for different German Television stations, amongst them ZDF, the German public state TV, RTL and Sat.1. He shot reports and documentaries in Germany, Austria, Spain, Ireland und Iceland. Often the social experiment was the subject of his movies, in many cases he shot these with hidden camera.

In 2002, for instance, he had a crop circle laid out in the surrounding countryside of Berlin. Over night and unobserved the crop circle-designer rolled out a round, 45 meters big pattern in a wheat field. The shape of this circle was inspired by a Tomato-Salami-Pizza, which they had ordered as refreshment from the local pizza delivery service. During the whole summer Maximilian Stelzle observed all the goings-on surrounding the crop circle, conducted interviews and filmed the investigations by the so-called crop circle-experts - without ever disclosing himself as the actual initiator of the crop circle. The media response was enormous, across the whole of Germany newspapers and TV stations reported about the mysterious pattern in the wheat field, making assumptions about its creation. It was not until autumn, that the team decided to disclosed in “stern TV” a program by RTL, a German channel, that the so-called “Schönwalder crop circle” was created on behalf of “stern TV” in order to observe the reactions and the behaviour of Scientists, the media and the nearby residents.

Vienna

In 2004 Maximilian Stelzle moved to Vienna. Since then he was responsible for the shooting of a great number of TV documentaries for the German-French cultural TV station “arte” and for the Austrian television.

For example in 2004, he developed the script for the 50 minutes Scientific documentary “Freak Waves”. The movie talks about the encounter of seamen with exceptionally high waves and explains the development and formation of these monster waves. For the movie, Maximilian Stelzle was filming in the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark and Montenegro. Amongst other things, the movie tells the tragic story of the 52 years old sailor Petar Markovic, who’s freighter “flare” of 181 meter length came into collision with one of these freak waves in the beginning of 1998. The whole destructive force of the wave broke the boat into two half. Within half an hour the stern sank. On the next day, Markovic and three of his colleagues were rescued by the Canadian Coast Guard, alive but in a miserable state. In the investigation report of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada it reads: “At this time, their body temperatures measure between 26° and 28 ° Celsius.” But the four men were lucky: they were the only ones brought out of the water alive.

For the Austrian television Maximilian Stelzle produced six episodes of the documentary “Das ganz normale Verhalten der Österreicher” - “the very normal behaviour of the Austrians”. The documentary is devoted to the everyday life of the people of his adopted country. Each episode is about 45 minutes long and deals with a specific topic. The director did, for example, document families and pedagogues educating children and teenagers; he provided an insight into how Austrians deal with their pets; filmed at public festivals, family parties, or accompanied couples for over a year documenting house building. In these movies the director provides the viewer with an intimate and unmasking insight into the typical human behaviour and examines the ethnological and psychological backgrounds.