Medienwerkstatt Franken

On the streets of Gleishammer, Max Morlock learned how to play soccer in the 1930s. He was just 16 years old when he stepped onto the pitch with the team of 1. FC Nuremberg for the first time in 1941. In 1948 and 1961, he won the German Championship with the club. In 1954, he scored the 1-2 against Hungary in the final of the World Cup in Switzerland, and initiated the “Miracle of Bern”. After 900 games, Max Morlock ended his career in May of 1964, and from then on, stood every day in his Lotto-Toto store in Nuremberg’s Südstadt district. Morlock died in 1994. On 11 May 2015, he would have turned 90. Morlock’s brother Robert, his eldest daughter Ursula, Edi Schaffer, the goalkeeper of the championship-winning eleven of 1948, Horst Eckel, who became world champion alongside Morlock in 1954, as well as Heiner Müller and Kurt Haseneder, who won the German Championship with Morlock in 1961, remember in this film from the year 2004 the extraordinary player and person that was Max Morlock.

Not everyone who nowadays drives on the A73 between Nuremberg and Bamberg knows that they are travelling on a former waterway. As recently as half a century ago, the old Ludwig-Main-Danube-Canal (in short: Ludwig-Canal) was located here, which represented the last puzzle piece of a navigable connection between the oceans. Built within a remarkable ten years’ time of construction, the canal, which was opened in 1846, was the realization of a small dream of humanity as it finally connected the North Sea with the Black Sea. Unfortunately, the idea could not support itself financially: Too powerful were the railroads, which saw their rise simultaneously, and which soon undermined the ambitious canal project’s future as they were in every regard the faster, more comfortable, and better means of transportation of the hour.

In a series of intimate talks, Peter S., the subject of the documentary, reflects with insight and reverence on dying, loving and living with the disease that has altered the course of our lives. I'm Still Alive! is a testament to the wisdom and resilience of the human spirit.