Stellar German actress Huller feels war guilt 'every day'

CANNES: German Oscar-nominated actress Sandra Huller said Friday she felt guilt for Germany’s role in World War II “every day”, as she discussed her latest acclaimed turn in a historical drama.

The multi-lingual star of Auschwitz-set “The Zone of Interest” has continued her gilded run of performances in “Fatherland” by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday.

The 48-year-old plays the emotionally conflicted daughter of German literary genius Thomas Mann in a black-and-white tale that sees the pair return to their shattered homeland in 1949 after years in exile in the United States.

“I feel the guilt every day, and also I never get bored of it,” Huller told journalists in Cannes when asked about how she used her own feelings about Germany’s Nazi past for the role.  

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“I feel the guilt because it’s necessary in order to act right,” she added.

Film bible Variety predicted prizes already, saying Huller’s “GPS is set for next year’s Oscar race” following her nomination for best actress in “Anatomy of a Fall” .

After her break-out year in 2023 when she starred in two Oscar winners, “The Zone of Interest” and “Anatomy of a Fall”, which also took top prize in Cannes, Huller has moved into US blockbusters.

She has a supporting role in the recent “Project Hail Mary” opposite Ryan Gosling and features in the all-star cast opposite Tom Cruise in “Digger” which is due out later this year.

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History in the present

“Fatherland” is one of a number of historical dramas in the Cannes main competition that return to events of the 1930s and 1940s at a time when the rise of far-right nationalism has led many historians to compare the current time with that troubled era.

Cannes director Thierry Fremaux has described the programme as “a way of bringing history into the present, of questioning it in the present.”

Other Cannes films set while fascism was on the march include “Moulin” about French Resistance hero Jean Moulin by Laszlo Nemes, “Our Salvation” about France’s war-time collaboration and “The Black Ball”, set during the Spanish civil war.

Pawlikowski, best known for “Ida”, returned to Cannes with his first film since his Oscar-nominated “Cold War” in 2018.

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“It’s interesting that there’s more and more films set in historical times,” Pawlikowski told reporters on Friday.

“Sometimes it’s easier to talk about now with a distance.”

“A lot of historical films that I watch, I notice they have a clear thesis… very often the characters in these films demonstrate something or explain something,” he added.

“I try to do the opposite. I try to just try to show how complicated it all is.”

The Hollywood Reporter said “Fatherland” was “immaculately performed” by veteran German actor Hanns Zischler and “especially Huller”, while the Guardian called the film an “impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette”.

It runs at just 82 minutes, short for a modern feature.

Pawlikowski said he had been inspired by a biography of Mann, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1929, but had changed the story, editing out Mann’s wife and also changing the timing of tragic events in the family’s history.