05/04/2005

The Heim ins Reich, L’échec d’une annexion, by Claude Lahr, has just been released on dvd (in original language and in French, German, and English) after an unprecendented success in Luxemburg for a documentary.

Heim ins Reich, which received the Best Prize as a historical research work at the International Unesco Art Film Festival in 2004, sold 26,300 tickets in Luxemburg in three months and stayed 5 weeks in a row in the top 5 of the national box-office, which is indeed the best result a documentary has ever had in this country.

Through a series of interviews and archive documents, Heim ins Reichguides us through the darkest moments of the German occupation in Luxemburg. For over four years, the country was occupied by the nazis who wanted to break its independant status and make the Dukedom of Luxemburg part of the German Reich. These years under the nazis has badly affected the Luxemburger society.

‘I first felt like dealing with the history of Luxemburg under the German occupation under the form of a documentary at the end of the 90’s, while I was working on Stol - Un siècle d'histoire sociale et industrielle dans le Bassin minier luxembourgeois (a Century of social and industrial history in the Luxemburger mines). When Willy Perelsztejn, (Les Films de la mémoire) told me about a project which was precisely focusing on the terrible nazi years, I was already in a starting-block, so to speak. Besides its historical interest, (...) there had never been a documentary on the German occupation as a whole (...),’ Claude Lahr explains. This €300,000 film was produced by Nowhere Land Productions (Lux), the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA) (Lux), and Les Films de la Mémoire (Belg). Its distributors are CNA for Luxemburg and Les Films de la Mémoire for the rest of the world. It will be broadcasted on RTBF and VRT (Belg).

(Translated from French)