The screening of ‘The Debt’ by director John Madden at the Frontline Club was announced as a bit of a rarity, moving away from the purely journalistic treatment to the fictionalisation of political issues.
The film, starring Academy-Award winner Helen Mirren, Academy-Award nominee Tom Wilkinson, and Ciaran Hinds, as well as Jessica Chastain and Sam Worthington, picks up in the lives of three Mossad operatives who worked together in the 60ies on a mission in East Berlin to extract Dieter Vogel, known as the ‘Surgeon of Birkenau’, a medical doctor who conducted cruel experiments on concentration camp inmates in Nazi Germany.
The occasion is the launch in 1997 of a book about the operation written by the daughter of the woman in the trio. Not wanting to give a way the plot as the film is going to be on general release in UK cinemas from 30 September, I’ll just talk about one aspect of it that struck a chord with me. To do this, I may have to digress a little.
After the fall of the Wall and German reunification, documentaries and feature films dealing with the ‘trauma’ that was the GDR history were everywhere. Some of them were the usual propaganda with a rather obvious agenda (or straight-forward counter-propaganda, if you want), some was very delicate and thoughtful work, revealing with a great deal of understanding deeper layers underneath the bare facts and leaving viewers to judge.
‘The Debt’, based on an Israeli film from 2007, explores several issues in a similar fashion. Apart from the obvious, Isreal’s policy of actively persuing outside their own jurisdiction those guilty of holocaust crimes, there is the motivation of the three young people to do what they have come together to do; there are the personal relationships within the group, couped up with only each other for company on a dangerous mission abroad; and there is an interesting exploration of the relationship between captive and captors, with the captive cleverly manipulating his captors who will carry a number of the personal issues arising during this mission with them for life.
However, even more interesting was the conflict between honesty and covering up the actual results of a mission, supposedly for the ‘greater good of society’. This in my opinion was as relevant an observation in East Germany as it is in Western democracies today as it is pretty much everywhere in the world. Inevitably at some point personal interests will clash with more powerful people’s personal interests, and under the mantle of ‘the public good’, lies are told.
A very interesting film, well worth watching.
The film, starring Academy-Award winner Helen Mirren, Academy-Award nominee Tom Wilkinson, and Ciaran Hinds, as well as Jessica Chastain and Sam Worthington, picks up in the lives of three Mossad operatives who worked together in the 60ies on a mission in East Berlin to extract Dieter Vogel, known as the ‘Surgeon of Birkenau’, a medical doctor who conducted cruel experiments on concentration camp inmates in Nazi Germany.
The occasion is the launch in 1997 of a book about the operation written by the daughter of the woman in the trio. Not wanting to give a way the plot as the film is going to be on general release in UK cinemas from 30 September, I’ll just talk about one aspect of it that struck a chord with me. To do this, I may have to digress a little.
After the fall of the Wall and German reunification, documentaries and feature films dealing with the ‘trauma’ that was the GDR history were everywhere. Some of them were the usual propaganda with a rather obvious agenda (or straight-forward counter-propaganda, if you want), some was very delicate and thoughtful work, revealing with a great deal of understanding deeper layers underneath the bare facts and leaving viewers to judge.
‘The Debt’, based on an Israeli film from 2007, explores several issues in a similar fashion. Apart from the obvious, Isreal’s policy of actively persuing outside their own jurisdiction those guilty of holocaust crimes, there is the motivation of the three young people to do what they have come together to do; there are the personal relationships within the group, couped up with only each other for company on a dangerous mission abroad; and there is an interesting exploration of the relationship between captive and captors, with the captive cleverly manipulating his captors who will carry a number of the personal issues arising during this mission with them for life.
However, even more interesting was the conflict between honesty and covering up the actual results of a mission, supposedly for the ‘greater good of society’. This in my opinion was as relevant an observation in East Germany as it is in Western democracies today as it is pretty much everywhere in the world. Inevitably at some point personal interests will clash with more powerful people’s personal interests, and under the mantle of ‘the public good’, lies are told.
A very interesting film, well worth watching.
