Pagan Peak

Cyrill Boss and Philipp Stennert's Pagan Peak (Der Pass) launched on Sky Deutschland in January 2019 as one of the most ambitious recent German-language genre productions. The series consolidated Boss and Stennert, the directorial team after their earlier SOKO Leipzig work, as one of the most internationally consequential contemporary German prestige-television creators. The series ran for three seasons through 2024.

A body is discovered on the Bavarian-Austrian border high mountain pass, posed in a ritualistic manner recalling pagan-Alpine mythology. Two detectives are forced to work across the cross-border-jurisdictional environment: the seasoned Austrian detective Gedeon Winter (Nicholas Ofczarek), whose career has been substantially compromised by previous misconduct, and the newly-appointed Bavarian detective Ellie Stocker (Julia Jentsch), whose professional ethics-and-procedural commitment is at substantial odds with Winter's. The series follows their investigation across the Alpine region.

The series operates in the broader Nordic-noir-influenced register that Central-European prestige drama has been refining across the previous decade. The Alpine cross-border environment (the actual Bavarian-Austrian border villages, the high-mountain-pass exteriors, the broader continuing geographical specificity of the region) produced a register few other recent German-language productions have equalled. Jentsch's central performance in particular is among the most-distinguished German-language television leads of recent years.