Lore (film)
Lore is a 2012 German-language historical drama film directed by Cate Shortland. It is based on the 2001 novel The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert. In south-west Germany, during the aftermath of World War II, five destitute siblings must travel 900 km (560 mi) to their grandmother's home by the Bay of Husum near Hamburg after their high-level Nazi parents disappear in danger of arrest by Allied occupation authorities. Along the way, they encounter a variety of other Germans, some of whom are helpful while others are antagonistic. Eventually they meet up with a young man presenting himself as Thomas, a young Jewish concentration camp survivor, who joins their group and becomes their unofficial guardian.
Lore
- Cate Shortland
- Robin Mukherjee
- Karsten Stöter
- Liz Watts
- Paul Welsh
- Benny Drechsel
- Saskia Rosendahl
- Kai Malina
- Nele Trebs
- Ursina Lardi
- Hans-Jochen Wagner
- Mika Seidel
- André Frid
- Eva-Maria Hagen
- Rohfilm
- Porchlight Films
- Edge City Films
- Piffl Medien (Germany)
- Transmission Films (Australia)
- 10 September 2012 (Australia)
- 11 October 2012 (Germany)
109 minutes[1]
- Australia
- Germany
- German
- English
EUR €4.3 million
Production[edit]
The producer Paul Welsh, secured the film rights to Rachel Seiffert's novel very early and asked Robin Mukherjee to write an adaptation for the cinema. When the director Cate Shortland joined the project she re-wrote part of the screenplay to make it fit her way of working. At a later stage, it was agreed that most of the dialogue should be in German, which delayed the production for a year and forced one of the British funding institutions to back out, as its rules didn't allow backing of non-English language films.[3]
Release[edit]
The film was first shown at the Sydney Film Festival on 9 June 2012, followed by the Festival del film Locarno on 2 August, where it won the Piazza Grande audience award, the Prix du public UBS.[4] It was then shown at a large number of film festivals around the world.[5] At the Stockholm International Film Festival, in November, the film was awarded four awards, including the Bronze Horse for best film. It was selected as the Australian entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, but it did not make the final shortlist.[6]
It was released on cinema in Australia on 20 September 2012, in Germany on 1 November 2012, and in France, Belgium, United Kingdom and Ireland in February 2013, when it also saw a limited release in the United States.[5]
Critical reception[edit]
Lisa Schwarzbaum, reviewer for Entertainment Weekly, gave the film a B+ and wrote, "This striking, slow-building drama from Cate Shortland (Somersault) uses fractured, impressionistic imagery as a mirror of moral dislocation as the children make their way through an unfamiliar landscape. If everything Lore (Saskia Rosendahl, capturing teen-girl sullenness) has been taught is wrong—about Hitler, about Jews, about the glory of her Vaterland, she might as well be walking on the moon."[7]
Shane Danielsen of SBS awarded the film four stars out of five, commenting that "Beautiful, it may be, but it is by no means a bourgeois film...it is a rebuke to notions of middle-class propriety, as well as a formidable work in its own right."[8]