Gebirtig

Colour, 35mm
Austria, Poland, Germany, USA, 2002, 115 min
Section: Official Selection - Competition

Synopsis

Hermann Gebirtig’s family died in a concentration camp. Danny Demant’s father met a similar fate. Susanne Ressell’s father joined the Communist party as a protest against Nazism. He was interned but he survived. Now, forty years later, as he is dying he recognises the former SS guard Pointer, the terror of the camp in Ebensee. Konrad Sachs’ father was a convinced Nazi and, as a doctor accused of crimes against humanity, he ended up appearing before the tribunal in Nuremberg. The lives of the last witnesses to Nazi atrocities and the descendants of those whose spirit and character were destroyed by the war now come together. Susanne sets off for New York in order to convince the famous Jewish composer Hermann Gebirtig, a holocaust survivor, to return home to Vienna to give his testimony….

About the director

Lukas Stepanik (b. 1950 in Vienna) and Robert Schindel (b. 1944 in Bad Hall) who wrote the 1992 novel of the same name upon which the film is based, have been working together since 1981, particularly for television. Filmography (selection): Auf der Strecke (1981), Bittersweet (1981), ...beschloss ich, Politiker zu werden (1984), Wie Tag und Nacht (1985), Kalkutta, Kalkutta (1986). The directors on their film: “Gebirtig is not about the Holocaust, nor about overcoming the past; its subject is overcoming the present. One can only overcome how the past affects the present and how people come to terms with this fact."