The Counterfeiters

Colour, 35 mm
Germany, Austria, 2007, 98 min
Section: Horizons

Synopsis

“In all of my films there are young heroes who go into life full of ideals and are forced under the pressure of evil to re-evaluate their notions of life," says the director. “But until now I haven’t had the opportunity to express the tension between idealism and pragmatism in such a dramatically existential framework.” The hero of the film, which tells a story inspired by true events, is the Jewish king of counterfeiters Salomon Sorowitsch. Before the war he mingled in a world of gamblers, gigolos, and prostitutes, and life was a mere game to him. But in 1944 he is arrested and finds himself in a concentration camp. Sorowitsch does not want to end up in a gas chamber, however, and his instinct for self-preservation leads him to co-operate with the Nazis on the top-secret “Operation Bernhard”. If he wants to survive, he has to work with the other prisoners to produce perfect false dollar and pound banknotes. But even for a man who avows no moral values, the situation ceases to be one of mere survival.

About the director

Stefan Ruzowitzky (b. 1961, Vienna) worked as a theatre director and wrote plays for the ORF broadcasts in Austria, and from 1987 he worked as a freelance director and writer. His film debut Tempo (1996) won the Max Ophüls award. His second film The One-Seventh Farmers (Die Siebtelbauern, also known as The Inheritors, 1998) won a number of festival awards, including the Tiger Award in Rotterdam, and in 1998 he was introduced in the Horizons section of the Karlovy Vary IFF. This was followed by the titles Anatomy (Anatomie, 2000), All the Queen’s Men (Männer Ihrer Majestät, 2001) and Anatomy 2 (Anatomie 2, 2002).