22/03/2006

Shooting on Der Fälscher by Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky (Anatomie, All the Queen's Men), began yesterday in Vienna. The story, written by the director using Adolf Burger’s memoirs of the Nazi period, will star television actor Karl Markovics, August Diehl (who is also in Ich bin die Andere by Margarethe von Trotta, currently in post-production and a possible Cannes selection) and Devid Striesow (The Red Cockatoo [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Karol Wojtyla).

Der Fälscher takes place in Monte Carlo during World War II. Salomon Sorowitsch, king of fraudsters in a world of gamblers, gigolos and easy women, is forced by the Nazis to use his counterfeiting talents on the trading floor, caught up in a war in which he is destined to perish. Like other Jews recruited in the concentration camps to use their skill for producing counterfeit money, he escaped the worst treatment meted out to other prisoners but was still unsure if he would come out alive.

With a financial package put together by the Hamburg production company Magnolia Filmproduktion for ZDF-Kino, Studio Babelsberg Motion Pictures and Aichholzer Filmproduktion (Austria) with the support of FilmFörderung Hamburg, the shoot will move next to Babelsberg, then to Monte Carlo and end on May 5.

(Translated from French)