Sometimes the best collaboration starts with an emergency.
The production team of Hessischer Rundfunk was in the midst of preparations for the 1247th Tatort episode – „Murot and Paradise“ starring Ulrich Tukur – when a promised main location unexpectedly fell through. The shooting schedule was set. The crew was booked. And suddenly the centerpiece was missing: the place where the story was supposed to take place.
You called us for a new location scout.
One week. Tens of thousands of square meters. Two skyscrapers.
What followed was exactly what we founded UEBERRAUM for. No long lead times, no cumbersome briefing – we knew the city, we knew the spaces, and we knew immediately where to look.
Within a week we had a solution: two vacant high-rise buildings in Frankfurt with tens of thousands of square meters – empty, silent, and with an atmosphere that no studio building in the world could have delivered.
The one was Union West, our very own pop-up space, then still in operation. A place with history, with charm, with that special feeling of departure and transience that we've always loved. The other was the disused Intercontinental Hotel next door – deserted corridors, empty ballrooms, an almost surreal heaviness in every room.
For a crime scene involving secret banker parties, a club called „Paradise,“ and the dark promise of eternal happiness, there could have been no more fitting stage.
The rest is film history
Filming took place in November and December 2022, with the film premiering in August 2023 at the Festival des Deutschen Films in Ludwigshafen—nominated for the Rheingold Audience Award. The first broadcast on ARD on October 22, 2023, was watched by nearly six million people, achieving over 21 percent market share.
Director Florian Gallenberger – an Oscar winner, a master of grand visuals – has created something unusual with this Tatort episode. A film that disregards genre boundaries, that references Kubrick and Tarantino, that philosophizes while also entertaining. FAZ, Spiegel, taz, and Tagesspiegel were enthusiastic. The audience was divided – which is almost a tradition with Murot Tatort episodes and somehow part of what makes them so good.
That some of these pictures were taken in rooms we made possible in just one week still makes us a little proud today.
What remains
The Union West Pop-Up Space is no more. The Intercontinental remains vacant. But the locations live on on millions of screens – in one of the most discussed crime scenes of recent years.
That's perhaps the most beautiful thing about our work: spaces that are actually at the end of their time get one last big moment. And sometimes, from that moment, something remains.
