Hermes Phettberg

The Harald Schmidt Show is a German late night talk show hosted on Sky Deutschland by comedian Harald Schmidt. The show first aired from 5 December 1995 to 23 December 2003 on Sat.1. Schmidt then moved his show to Das Erste as Harald Schmidt and Schmidt & Pocher, but he returned to Sat.1 on 13 September 2011. After cancellation on Sat.1, the show continued on Sky Deutschland in September 2012.

The likes of Antoine de Caunes, Jean Paul Gaultier, Davina McCall, and Lolo Ferrari are your guides to the weird and wonderful in Europe and beyond. How else would you learn about pubic hairdressers, the Penis Olympics, or the latest Japanese sex toys?

The diagnosis: an aneurysm in the brain. Then follow two nightmarish months during which we accompany the filmmaker. An essayistic audio-visual collage, in which Sobo Swobodnik shows us what it means to live with a potentially fatal condition.

The actor, columnist, author, moderator, the failed pastoral assistant, the self-confessed gay sadomasochist, the total work of art Hermes Phettberg, who has always been relentlessly open about his life, his suffering in himself and the world, gives insight into his current existence. Despite his decline, Phettberg has remained a charismatic, unique "pyre" (as he calls himself) who documents his slowly fading life daily on the Internet and in his weekly column in the Viennese city magazine "Falter" and struggles to survive as Austria's best-known welfare recipient. Sobo Swobodnik shows this daily struggle of a one-time star who became a patronized outsider - with three strokes, a heart attack, extreme bladder weakness and an irrepressible will to go on living.