Die Schneider Krankheit (Spanish: El Mal de Schneider; English: The Schneider Disease, alternately Schneider's Disease) is a 2008 Spanish short science fiction mockumentary film written, directed, and produced by Javier Chillon, with brief animated sequences by Alicia Manero. Chillon's first film was shot on black and white Super 8 film, with a Spanish-language voice-over dubbed over another German one. With credits and most other onscreen text in German, the short film gives the impression of being a West German educational documentary film of the 1950s or 1960s. Its subject is the effect of an extraterrestrial plague brought to Earth by a Soviet chimpanzee cosmonaut after its capsule crash landed near the border with East Germany in 1958. Financed entirely by Chillon himself, the short film was selected for more than 200 international film festivals and received more than 45 awards within the first two years of its release, including a Méliès d'Argent in 2010.

Plot

In 1958, recent history is presented in the form of a documentary about a crashed Soviet space capsule near the border with East Germany. Inside the capsule is a chimpanzee cosmonaut, taken and subjected to tests by West German scientists. Soon after the discovery, the same scientists and their assistants get sick. The sickness spreads, and within a month, the first of the infected begin to die.