Director: Felix Moeller
Stars: August Zirner, Alice Harlan, Lotte Harlan
Genre: Documentary
Country: Germany | Finland
Though almost forgotten today, Veit Harlan was one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious filmmakers. His most perfidious film was the treacherous anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß (1940) – required viewing for all SS members. An unrepentant and blindly obsessive craftsman, no figure – save for Leni Riefenstahl – is as closely associated with the cinema of the Holocaust years. (Harlan’s epic Kolberg (1945) was the basis for Inglourious Basterds (2009)’s pivotal film-within-a-film Stolz Der Nation.) This documentary is an eye-opening examination of World War II film history as well as the story of a German family from the Third Reich to the present; one that is marked by reckoning, denial and liberation.