BERLIN (AP) — Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham play a convincing father and daughter in German director Julia von Heinz’ first English-language film, “Treasure.” Set in post-communist Poland, the comedy-drama had its world premiere on the Berlin Movie Pageant over the weekend.
Dunham joked in an interview that when she despatched her mom a photograph after her first read-through with Fry, her mom replied, “I believe we now know who your actual father is.”
Dunham mentioned she was filled with nerves assembly Fry: “Assembly your heroes is an advanced factor, and it turned out to be higher than I might have dreamed.”
The movie exhibits the pair on a highway journey to Poland to retrace household historical past. Fry performs Holocaust survivor Edek, who reluctantly accompanies his daughter Ruth, a New York journalist. He confronts painful recollections and shares elements of his previous that he had stored buried for years.
The story is predicated on Lily Brett’s ebook “Too Many Males.”
Fry realized Polish for the position. Each actors mentioned they related with their Jewish heritage.
“After I learn the script, I might hear my grandfather’s voice, and it grew to become extra so the additional we obtained in,” Fry mentioned. “It by no means occurred to me rising up that there could possibly be a possibility to re-investigate the story in that sort of means.”
“I had the identical expertise as Stephen,” Dunham mentioned. “I heard echoes of my great-grandmother Mildred, and the not simply the tales that we instructed in our household however the tales that we didn’t inform.”
Dunham’s household got here from Poland, near the place the movie was shot. Her great-grandmother misplaced 9 siblings firstly of the Holocaust in 1941, one thing she solely realized by her investigations into household historical past.
Her character, Ruth, suffers the unsaid aftermath of her father or mother’s experiences. It was this trauma that von Heinz wished to discover.
“If one individual in a household experiences battle or terror or trauma and won’t discuss it, possibly to guard their kids, possibly to guard themselves, they are going to really feel it” the director mentioned. “It’ll journey by the generations till somebody is able to really feel it and to confront the mother and father and to have a dialogue.”
Fry mentioned it’s comprehensible {that a} survivor with a daughter rising up in New York wouldn’t need the kid to know “absolutely the depths of depravity that he would have seen day-after-day as a survivor in Auschwitz.”
He added: “She’s in America. She’s free. That is the land of marvel and splendor and happiness and certainly, comfortable Jews.”
Filming inside Auschwitz is prohibited, so von Heinz obtained particular permission to recreate the barracks on a soccer discipline simply exterior the fence. She felt the scenes there have been integral to Fry’s portrayal of Edek.
“This place does one thing to you that you simply can’t say, however you’re feeling it,” she mentioned.
The movie premieres in Berlin at a time when antisemitism is on the rise and help for the far proper is rising, significantly in Germany.
When the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel passed off on Oct. 7, all of the solid had been in contact by textual content, von Heinz mentioned. That led to the choice to complete the movie extra rapidly than deliberate “and to have it right here at Berlinale, as a result of it’s the very second for a movie like that.”
However Dunham mentioned it was the broader implications of the story that she wished to inform.
“It’s not simply antisemitism that’s on the rise, it’s Islamophobia. It’s racism in America. It’s about worry of distinction,” she mentioned. “And I believe it’s actually, actually essential for us to share the story not only for Jewish individuals, however to sort of discuss what occurs generationally when persons are remoted or subjected to violence or subjected to that sort of hateful scrutiny.”
Louise Dixon, The Related Press
