21/10/2013 - Frankfurt is the main location for the German post-war drama Im Labyrinth about the Attorney General who kicked off the first Auschwitz trial

With the historical feature film Im Labyrinth, which is shot in Frankfurtuntil the end of November, German scriptwriter Elisabeth Bartel and co-writer/ director Giulio Ricciarelli open a significant chapter of German post-war history. The leading characters in this political drama are played by former German shooting star Alexander Fehling (Goethe! [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Inglorious Bastards; And Along Come Tourists [+see also:
trailer
interview: Alexander Fehling
film profile]) and Gert Voss (The Moor’s Head, Sometime in August [+see also:
trailer
film profile]). The cast also includes André Szymanski, Friederike Becht, and Johann von Bülow.

Post-war Germany, 1958: The economic miracle is changing the life of Germans. Most of them are sick of the war and prefer to push their guilt to the back of their mind. When a journalist (André Szymanski) identifies a teacher in the playground as a former guard from Auschwitz, no one will take notice. But a young prosecutor (Alexander Fehling) brings on this case and can’t even be stopped by his boss. During his research he realizes that some Germans pretend that they never heard the expression “Auschwitz” while the others try to forget about it. As the resolute prosecutor doesn’t give up, the Attorney General (Gert Voss) retains him to take charge of the investigations. Struggling with an overload of information, the young attorney blunders into a labyrinth of guilt and lies where he almost gets lost.

While the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer declared at the time “We have to draw a line here,” the Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer enforced the first Auschwitz trial on German soil. Thanks to him, the German public realized for the first time what kind of crimes the Nazis had committed and that almost all of the perpetrators still stayed out of prison. The movie will end on December 20, 1963 when the first Auschwitz trial started in the town hall of Frankfurt.

Im Labyrinth is produced by Uli Putz und Jakob Claussen from Munich-based Claussen + Wöbke + Putz Filmproduktion and Sabine Lamby who runs together with Giulio Ricciarelli the naked eye Filmproduction. Budgeted at € 3.6m, the debut feature is supported by HessenInvest, the Bavarian film fund FFF, Federal Film Board as well as the German Federal Film Fund DFFF.

Universal Pictures International Germany will release Im Labyrinth in Germany in 2014.