Aljoscha Pause

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.

Aljoscha Pause was born on 24 January 1972 in Bonn, Germany.

After he graduated high school, he studied romance philology at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University.

Pause served as a sports reporter at German Sports Television (now Sport1) from 1996 to 1999.

Pause received narration training at Deutsche Welle from 1998 until 2002.

Throughout his college years, Pause worked at Pantheon, a cabaret theater founded by his father, Rainer Pause.

During this time he also began working as a reporter for a local magazine and a broadcaster at a private radio station (Radio Bonn/Rhein-Sieg).

He began his television career at age 24.

Following that, he worked as a reporter for the main sports desk at Kirch Media Group, Sat.1 until 2003.

Pause also worked as a filmmaker, presenter, commentator, and field reporter for Premiere (now Sky Germany).

In 2003, Pause became an independent filmmaker and producer.

He is known for his longer documentary films primarily focusing on the sociopolitical aspects of sports (e.g. homophobia in football, hooliganism in sports, alcohol consumption in football, and the German Football League for the Blind).

The trilogy included The Great Taboo (2008), Breaking the Taboo (2009), and Football is Everything--Even Gay (2011).

The Great Taboo: Homophobia in Football (2008) premiered on DSF in 2008.

The first investigative TV documentary on the subject to gain traction, it featured the stories of LGBTQ+ athletes like Tanja Walther and Anouschka Bernhard, who are both lesbians, and referee Marie Karsten, who is transgender.

The Great Taboo (2008) won the 2008 Felix Rexhausen Award from the Association of Lesbian and Gay Journalists (Bund Lesbischer und Schwuler Journalistlnnen, or BLSJ, the German affiliate of the NLGJA).

The judges described it as an "honest, dispassionate stock-taking" of the LGBTQ+ experience for athletes in Germany "...[a]s informative as it is sober... [which] subtly reveals how widespread anti-gay feeling is in the world of football--on every level."

The film picks up one year after the release of its first installment, investigating developments in the German Football Association since the uptick of popular interest following the first film in 2008.

Additionally, he held the position of a reporter for LIGA total!, the Bundesliga broadcaster of Deutsche Telekom, from 2009 until 2011.

Today, Pause lives with his wife and two daughters in Bonn.

In 2009, Pause and DSF released the second installment of the three-part series, Breaking Taboo: The New Progress of Homosexuality in Football (2009).

In 2010, Breaking Taboo earned Pause an Alternative Media Prize and the Grimme Prize in the category for "Information & Culture/Special."

The film follows professional athlete Thomas Broich's career from its auspicious beginning in the Bundesliga up until his transfer to Brisbane Roar, an Australian club, in 2010.

Pause is also known for his portrait documentaries, whose subjects are usually football players, but also include the actor Michael Jäger (an ex-hooligan who starred in the early-evening soap opera Marienhof). His first two full-length feature films, Tom meets Zizou) (2011) and Trainer! (2013) received acclaim from film critics internationally. In 2010, he received the Grimme Prize for producing a TV documentary series he produced about homophobia in football.

Created for Sky One and DSF with the support of the German Academy for Football Culture, Pause produced a three-part TV documentary series on homophobia in football filmed over the course of three years.

In March 2011, Pause released the final installment, entitled Football ls Everything--Even Gay (2011).

For the third installment, Pause monitored 18 months of developments and explores the difficulty of changing attitudes on the topic.

In 2011, Aljoscha Pause released the 135-minute documentary Tom Meets Zizou (2011) after eight years of work.

Tom meets Zizou publicly debuted on March 25, 2011 at the 8th International Football Film Festival 11mm in Berlin.

It opened in theaters on July 28, under the banner of Mindjazz Pictures with support from the DFB Cultural Foundation.

The film was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in late 2011.

That same year, Tom Meets Zizou (2011) received the VDS Television Prize.

At the 11mm Football Film Festival, it received a nomination for "Best Football Film of All Time".

Tom Meets Zizou (2011) was screened at the International Young Audience Film Festival (Poznań, Poland), the Thinking Football Film Festival (Bilbao), and ClNEfoot Festival (Rio de Janeiro).

On August 21, 2012, Tom Meets Zizou (2011) gained additional popularity when a 90-minute version played on German broadcast station WDR.

Pause's short film Mesut, 17 premiered in March 2013 at the 11mm Film Festival in Berlin.

The subject of the nine-and-a-half-minute film is German athlete Mesut Özil, who was 17 years old at the time.

On February 1, 2014, it was screened at the Flutlicht Film Festival in a double feature on the subject of failure alongside alongside Trainer!.

The film has been translated into languages including English, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese.