Karl Markovics plays the gaunt, crafty artist “Sally” Sorowitsch in this drama based on a true story about several dozen Jews who survive World War II at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they work forging millions of U.S. dollars and British pounds for the Nazis – what turns out to be the biggest counterfeiting operation in history.
Grainy, realistic camerawork, multi-dimensional characters and a gripping, tightly written script come together to make the film by Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s (Anatomy, All the Queen’s Men) the one to beat for this year’s Golden Bear, which will be announced today.
Germany is no lightweight when it comes to making heavy, self-incriminating films about the war (The Downfall and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days were both recent Oscar nominees).
Still, you can’t help but conclude, seeing the surfeit of Berlin festival films revolving around that era, that in this capital, if not elsewhere, viewers remain riveted to – and unable to escape from – the 62-year-old past.
“I was always waiting for an opportunity to take a position on the issue,” said director Ruzowitzky.
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“And while I wanted to make a film about normal, everyday life in a concentration camp with all the seriousness required, this (film) is not only a history lesson. It is about universal issues.”
The Counterfeiters may be the festival’s best narrative told from inside the war, but the best footage of war itself is certainly Clint Eastwood’s out-of-competition Letters From Iwo Jima. Moreover, though they were dismissed by reviewers when they opened in theatres in North America, Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German and Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd both found warmer public responses during their competition screenings in Berlin.
Of course, war wasn’t only theme directors packed into their bag of tricks and brought to Berlin. Julie Delpy provided a glut of locker room humour and cross-cultural relationship squabbling in Two Days in Paris. Chan-wook Park’s surreal follow-up to his Vengeance trilogy in I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK depicted young people’s tragicomic life in a Korean insane asylum.
And in no way overlooked, the festival opener, Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose, dramatized the life of France’s tortured and legendary singer Edith Piaf –played with vivacious, stunning craft by Marion Cotillard.
Other films screening with some success in the opening days of the Berlinale include Cao Hamburger’s shadowy portrait of the Brazilian dictatorship, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, which is told from a boy’s perspective in a Jewish neighbourhood in Sao Paolo and set against the backdrop of the country’s 1970 World Cup victory; and Bille August’s stirring historical drama Goodbye Bafana about the prison warder who spent two decades guarding Nelson Mandela.