In Circle of Deceit Schlöndorff deftly mixes the personal and the political to great effect in a film that stars two of the biggest names of the New German Cinema, Bruno Ganz and Hanna Schygulla. Shot on location, the film drips authenticity in its creation of a dizzyingly complex world within which Ganz plays an experienced ‘seen-it-all’ journalist who has to face up to a series of moral questions when he arrives in Beirut to report on a political situation that is lurching into war.