Germany — DACH Stunt Credits Vanish Into Genre Labels Ahead of the Oscars' Stunt Design Award

• German, Austrian and Swiss databases file every action credit under one label.
• That makes repeat work by coordinators such as Ferdi Fischer impossible to trace between jobs.
• The Academy’s stunt design award starts with the 2027 release year and needs named credits.

Posted: August 30, 2026

STUNT.BLOG published a credit-forensics piece on the German-language market arguing that the action craft in DACH productions is real and continuous while the paper trail behind it is not. The core problem is a working one for anyone trying to build a career in Germany, Austria or Switzerland: public production databases collapse fight choreographer, fight design, action director and stunt coordinator into a single undifferentiated bucket, so repeat coordinator work cannot be traced from title to title. A coordinator with a decade of credits reads, in the data, like a stranger on every job.

The article works through named examples. Ferdi Fischer is credited stunt coordinator and fight choreographer on ZDF's Crystal Wall — an MMA-fighter-turned-bodyguard story where the fight work has to carry character authority rather than decorate it — and as action director, stunt coordinator and second-unit camera on ZDF's Die Hexenprinzessin, which also ran WarpCam specialist camera work. Erwin Reichel shares the stunt credit on Crystal Wall. Oliver Keller's stunt coordination on Tschugger — Der lätscht Fall took a Swiss Film Academy special prize in 2025, and he also coordinated Jakobs Ross. Gerhard Salmina handled second-unit stunt work on KLAMMER — Chasing the Line, a ski biopic built on stunt skiers, crash gags and second-unit coverage that carries no action classification anywhere in its metadata.

That last case is the argument in miniature: the work is a full stunt package, but because the picture is filed as a sports drama it never registers as action, and the department never accrues visible track record. The piece ties the urgency to the Academy's Achievement in Stunt Design award, which becomes eligible with the 2027 release year — an award that will be voted on the basis of attributable, department-level credit. Territories that have not standardised how coordinators, riggers and fight designers are recorded will be submitting work that the record cannot properly name.

Source: STUNT.BLOG — Action Desert DACH: Visible Craft, Fragmented Pipeline

Learn more on IMDb: Ferdi Fischer · Oliver Keller