Aljoscha Pause is a German filmmaker, director, TV journalist, writer and producer. He is a member of the Deutsche Filmakademie and the German Academy for Football Culture.
Childhood, education and early career
Aljoscha Pause grew up in Bonn. After completing high school, he studied Romance philology at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn. He received training as a narrator at Deutsche Welle between 1998 and 2002. Pause, his wife and two daughters live in Bonn. During his school and college years, a worked at the cabaret theater "Pantheon" of his father Rainer Pause, while also working as a reporter for a local city magazine and a private radio broadcaster (Radio Bonn/Rhein-Sieg). At the age of 24 he began a career in television, initially from 1996 to 1999 as a sports reporter at German Sports Television (now called Sport1) and later from 1999 to 2003 at the main sports desk of Kirch Media Group, Sat.1 (with the flagship program "Ran") and Premiere, where he worked as a filmmaker, presenter, commentator and field reporter. From 2009 to 2011 Aljoscha Pause also served as a reporter for the Bundesliga broadcaster of Deutsche Telekom, "LIGA total!"
Cinematic works
Pause has worked as a self-employed producer and filmmaker since 2003, focusing on longer documentary films. His film projects often deal with sociopolitical aspects of sports (e.g. homophobia in football, hooligans, alcohol consumption and football, the German Football League for the Blind). An additional topic of emphasis is personal portraits, mostly about football players but also about actor Michael Jäger (an ex-hooligan who for ten years played a role on the early-evening soap opera "Marienhof"). His first full-length cinematic releases were two well-received, long-term documentaries, "Tom meets Zizou" (2011) and "Trainer!" (2013). Pause has received numerous prizes and awards for his work, including the leading television award in Germany, the Grimme Prize (2010, for "Breaking the taboo").
Trilogy – Homophobia in Football (2008–2011) Produced in 2008 for DSF, "The Great Taboo – Homosexuality and Football" was an "honest, dispassionate stock-taking" of the conditions facing homosexual soccer athletes in Germany. lt was the first extensive TV documentary to deal with the topic, and for this reason was honored by the Association of Lesbian and Gay Journalists (Bund Lesbischer und Schwuler Journalistlnnen, BLSJ) with the 2008 Felix Rexhausen Prize. (Statement by the panel of judges: "Outstandingly researched and with a broad scope, this is an immensely enlightening report [...] lt shows the entire spectrum – from the fans in the stadiums to lesbian ex-professionals such as Tanja Walther and Anouschka Bernhard and the transsexual referee Marie Karsten. Spectacular is the misguided statement by Cologne coach Christoph Daum, which made national headlines. The 45-minute documentary is as informative as it is sober, and subtly reveals how widespread anti-gay feeling is in the world of football – on every level."
In the second part of the trilogy "Breaking the Taboo – The New Progress of Homosexuality in Football" (2009), Pause devotes another 12 months to the topic and films ongoing developments. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, "Pause has bequeathed a journalistic exclamation mark to the private broadcasting company DSF. He lives up to the expectations that the big publicly funded broadcasters have as yet failed to fulfill in even the most perfunctory way." One year after his first documentary, he investigates whether there were indeed any actual developments in the German Football Association and league following the "initial spark" and discussion in 2008. For this film, Pause received the 2010 "Alternative Media Prize" and the Grimme Prize in the category Information & Culture/Special.
Following the productions of "The Great Taboo – Homosexuality and Football" (2008) and "Breaking the Taboo – The New Progress of Homosexuality in Football" (2009), Pause returned in March 2011 with the third part of his trilogy on the subject of "Homosexuality in Football" with a documentary for Sport 1 called "Football ls Everything - Even Gay" in which he asks just how difficult it really is to make long-term attitude changes about a taboo topic. The filmmaker monitored developments over 18 months to prepare this documentary.
All three films were created in cooperation with the "German Academy for Football Culture".