12/05/2025 - The German director details his first feature, about the taboo topic of paedophilia, awarded in Tallinn's Black Nights Film Festival and more recently in Italy's Riviera International Film Festival

After premiering at the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival last year, where it won the Best First Feature Award, German director Steve Beche’s film No Dogs Allowed [+see also:
film review
interview: Steve Bache
film profile] was in competition at the 9th Riviera International Film Festival (6-11 May), taking place in Sestri Levante. At this festival, dedicated to independent cinema with a competition reserved for directors under 35, the film won the Audience Award and the Best Actor Award. We spoke with the director about making a film about such a taboo topic as paedophilia and about his work with the leading actor. 

Cineuropa: Why did you decide to deal with such an important and strong theme in your first feature film? 
Steve Bache: We were just interested in how society deals with this topic. The starting point was that I read an article about a 15-year-old who went into therapy in Berlin. For me, it was like a world was opening up. So we did a lot of research and put out a call for online interviews. I expected to meet older people who could tell us what happens in these situations, but instead, I found myself talking to a 15-year-old who contacted us anonymously. He told us that to talk with someone about his paedophilic tendencies, he needed to go to the dark web. There, he found his mentor, a 40-year-old guy who wanted to get intersexual contact with him. So we got into a complicated relationship where we tried to get him out of it, because we knew that what could happen to him wouldn't be good. But he said he had control over the situation, that everything was fine. So we started to develop our script. After one year, we got into contact with him again to see how his life was going. He told us that two weeks prior, the police had knocked at his door: the man had been arrested by the police because he had stuff going on with minors and they wanted to question him because they thought maybe he was another victim. But he never wanted to testify against his mentor because he was scared that his own secret would come to light. So this story just presented itself to us. We just had to put it in the film.

What was the work to get Carlo Krammling into the role of Gabo? Was it difficult to work with such young actors on such a sensitive topic? 
I was quite lucky because Carlo was actually 21 years old, and not 15, when we were shooting the film. He had just started acting school. He did a casting, and when we chose him, he wasn’t sure whether to do it because it’s a tough topic. Basically, we tried to bring it to a level where it would be about love. For me, it was very important to not have the actor judging his character, I tried to tell him not to think about this tendency, and just think about being in love and trying to keep this love down. What we found out in our research is that, most of the time, it's more about an emotional thing and not much a sexual thing, and so it made it easier for him to play this character because everyone knows what it feels like to be in love. Regarding the 8-year-old boy, ourselves, his parents and the psychologist decided that he didn't need to know what the story was about. All his scenes are very light, he is a little brother and all he knew was that his older brother had some fight with his best friend.

At times, the film is difficult to watch and hear, too.
We had discussions about it and we had two options: make the film more digestible for the audience, which was the easier way, or telling it like it is, and we wanted to go this way, because me and my screenwriter, we both are fans of films that shake us to the core, that raise uncomfortable questions within ourselves. I think this is something cinema is capable of: to put you in shoes you would never step into. 

There is a lot of suspense, too, because we follow this circle that gradually tightens around the boy and we understand that all his lies won’t go too far. 
It was intentional to have a film which is not just a teaching film, we still wanted to have a thrilling film. I like this change of genre, too: at the beginning, it's more like this arthouse film which is slow and you discover this character, and then, with the police coming in, it gets really tight for him.

In Germany there is a self-reporting prevention programme for people with paedophilic tendencies, and yet in the film Gabo seeks help in the dark web. Do these programmes actually work?
We appreciate these programmes, they are doing a very good job. But when we were talking to the original 15-year-old boy and we invited him to go to this program, he didn't want to call them. I think most people don't seek this help even if they want help because they don't want to be labeled: you have this slight hope in the back of your head that maybe you don't have this tendency, that maybe it will go away someday. We tried to recreate it in the scene where Gabo is calling and he just hangs up because he is scared that maybe his mother will get involved, but actually these programmes are very good, they are a real help.

Why did you choose the title No Dogs Allowed?
No Dogs Allowed recalls the signs that are in playgrounds where dogs are not allowed, in this case people with these tendencies are not allowed in our society. This is to symbolise the fact that we cannot pretend that these people do not exist and simply marginalise them, it is necessary to talk about these issues to prevent these people from being left in the dark and left free to develop tendencies and commit crimes.