Born to Fake (2026)

Germany’s media landscape was rocked in 1996 by one of its most notorious scandals: Michael Born, a self-taught journalist, had fabricated more than twenty news reports between 1990 and 1996 for a fledgling private TV network. Some stories looked amateurish; others bordered on the absurd—child labor in IKEA’s Indian supply chain, drug users getting high by licking toads, and a Ku Klux Klan chapter in the Eifel region were just a few of his inventions. How did it go this far? Was Born a savvy whistleblower exposing the tabloid machinery, a pawn of the system, or simply a hapless con artist? This documentary retraces Born’s path, weaving together hundreds of hours of raw footage and the recollections of those who knew him. What unfolds is an unbelievable tale of deception. A media-theory film probing layers of reality, fake news, and the core question: Why do we actually trust what we see?