How Animals Feel

An offended dog, a rat ready to help, a compassionate chimpanzee, a fair wolf and an understanding elephant. Animals consoling each other, cooperating and taking care of each outher without getting anything in return.

Director: Gabi Schlag

Gabi Schlag is a director and author for film and television. With her main emphasis on science and culture, she works primarily on documentaries and reports for public broadcasters. The hybrid genre of docufiction is her special preference: documentaries complemented with fictional elements. Together with Benno Wenz, Gabi Schlag successfully developed the six-part crime scene series „Tatort Berlin“ for broadcaster RBB. This series reopens historical criminal cases and has scientists analyse them according to modern criminological standards. At the moment, Gabi Schlag is devising the concept for and implementing „Secret murder investigation in the German Democratic Republic“ for ZDF History and ARTE. In her role as author and director, she makes abstract issues comprehensible by giving them an informative and entertaining structure and by using innovative and suspenseful methods of visualisation. Her second focus lies on the impact that scientific innovation has on society. Accordingly, she has a special interest in cognitive research involving animals.
Since 2008 she is an intermittent guest lecturer in Berlin at the Free University's department for science journalism with a focus on television; at the journalism department with a focus on visualising scientific and cultural matters for TV; and at the University of the Arts in the field of cultural journalism. Gabi Schlag currently lives in Berlin with her family.

Germany
2015
52 Min.
German
12
Director: Gabi Schlag
Script: Gabi Schlag
Cinematography: Uwe Bohrer
Editing: Robert Tomschke & Andrea Trüber
Music:
Narrator: Ilka Teichmüller
Editor: ZDF/ARTE Linde Dehner
Producer: Ilona Grundmann Filmproduction
Nominations: Best Animal Behaviour 2016