Humanity at rock bottom. And survival of the same.
Day 2 @TIFF_NET picks: Lore, Camp 14, London The Modern Babylon, Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Lots of political system critique ahead.
I was very curious to see Australian-German copro #Lore as it comes highly recommended by my colleagues @GoetheAustralia, who have already screened it. Interestingly for a Nazi period piece, it takes the POV of a teenager in the mayhem at the end of WWII. Young lead actor Saskia Rosendahl should be Germany's new Shooting Star, in a great child/youth actor ensemble overall --including Kai Malina of Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or winning The White Ribbon.
I already wrote about the German-language aspect and the Australian director, but an interview with The Australian last week went deeper into that topic: Shortland, who wrote the screenplay in English, then worked with a translator to produce the final script, says it could have been done no other way. "I knew with the kids if there was any sense of it not being real or truthful, the audience was not going to emotionally engage."
Shortland describes the intuitive rehearsal process with the two young leads: "Saskia became my translator to Kai. I really like having that intimacy on set, so sometimes I'd do a rehearsal with just them and me. Because I'd written the script I knew what they were saying - I just didn't know sometimes in which order they were saying it."
Still, the German script translator played a central role as a cultural facilitator: "We changed a lot of dialogue through the translation process. [translator Elisabeth Meister] would say to me, 'oh, Germans wouldn't do that'; 'no, we wouldn't say that'; or 'that wouldn't happen, that wouldn't be polite'. So it was a fantastic process of cultural exchange right from the start."
P.S. The mid-30s German-Jewish family photos in the film are actually those of Shortland's husband's own family, filmmaker Tony Krawitz (Jewboy, Dead Europe).
On to Camp 14....
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
