Helmut Costard (after Wikipedia translated the page into English)
1968 saw Costard a scandal on the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen: His film Especially Valuable was a talking penis, which quotes a passage of the (then newly adopted) film funding law. The festival refused to show the film, although it, the selection committee – which include the journalists Wolfram Schütte , Enno Patalas and Uwe Nettelbeck belonged – had assumed. Nettelbeck had also in the weekly magazine Time published an article that took for Costard party.
Nearly all German directors eventually decided back their contributions, the writer Peter Handke left in protest to the jury, the filmmaker Werner Herzog, however, wanted to participate in the festival. Only after heated discussions and the intervention of the festival director Hilmar Hoffmann, the festival could be continued. Especially was valuable now for film study circle at the Ruhr-University Bochum managed, where he still could be shown against the arranged seizure, because the then Rector Kurt Biedenkopf according to legend, the prosecutor entry to the campus refused.
Costard was subsequently become one of the most prominent representatives of the German experimental film. Among his most famous productions of film Football As Never Before heard in the British player the camera during the entire length of a football match George Best observed. In the Super8 production The Little Godard, he worked with colleagues as directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Hark Bohm and Rainer Werner Fassbinder together.
With the beginning of the 80s, however, it became increasingly difficult for Costard to obtain the necessary funding for its projects.