23/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: The Russian director in exile elaborates on his motivation to dissect a Nazi mind on screen and reveals behind-the-scenes production details

(© Vahid Amanpour)

Prolific filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov has returned to the Cannes Film Festival just a year after presenting his previous feature, Limonov: The Ballad [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], in the 77th edition’s Competition. This time, he is part of Cannes Première with The Disappearance of Josef Mengele [+see also:
film review
interview: Kirill Serebrennikov
film profile]. The unlikeable character at the centre of the film prompts some unusual reflections – a quality Serebrennikov discusses in our conversation.

Cineuropa: In both Limonov: The Ballad and The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, you offer an alternative angle on history. Is this a conscious choice or something that emerges during research?
Kirill Serebrennikov: It’s intentional. Most of the narrative about the post-war world comes from the victims’ side, which is important and rich. We hear victims' voices, but how did these educated people, people who knew poetry and music, become monsters? I was inspired by Jonathan Littell’s extraordinary book The Kindly Ones, which is basically the monologue of an SS officer. Reading it was a shocking experience for me – for the first time I was inside the mind of a Nazi. It helped me understand the mindset. And my intention was to do the same, to put the camera inside the brain of Mengele, and show his motivation. Furthermore, I wanted to get a grasp of the collective system called Mengele – the people who helped him, protected him, funded him, hid him. Altogether, they made Mengele possible. After the war, they helped him avoid justice and vengeance. The film is about that, more than just one man.

What feels dangerous to me now is that we have lost the idea of what is good and what is bad. When the situation gets foggy, we lose our sense of stability, our humanity. We need to be able to clearly recognise evil. If we say, “it’s complicated,” and start justifying things, we are falling into the trap of propaganda. The moment you say “it’s not okay to kill people, but...” –  that but is what leads to a lot of blood.

The film is based on Olivier Guez’s book of the same title, but I suppose you did additional research?
The book was our main guide, of course, but since I’m not someone who knows everything about Mengele, his story was a challenge for me. Therefore, I did many interviews with German people, who told me about their past, revealed the skeletons in their closets. I’m not German or German-speaking, so I needed to learn about post-war German life – about families, the legacy of defeat, silence. I asked actors, journalists, friends, producers – I did almost 30 interviews – just to hear their stories about their grandparents, how they behaved during and after the war. Many had to remain silent. It was not even acceptable to say “I’m German.” And interestingly, we could not get funding from German institutions, similarly to The Zone of Interest, which also got none. German funds say: “No more money for Holocaust and Nazi topics, we’ve had enough.” Perhaps they are right. But we still had to make the film.

With no funding from German institutions, are there concerns about releasing the film in Germany?
Yes, it’s a very painful topic. But Germany loves discussion, so maybe the film has the potential to create a big debate there. That would be good. We have a German distributor. I met him yesterday and he said they will do their best to release it widely.

Now, outside of Russia, you work across languages and countries. Do you consider yourself a transnational director? 
Yes. Currently, I’m staging Boris Godunov in Amsterdam, my first Russian opera abroad. It is very serious. I used to do Wagner, Mozart, European classics – but this is different. After that, I’ll do a film or opera in France, shoot in Latvia, perform in Austria, and Germany. That’s why I love Europe – it’s transparent, close, culturally rich. You can do a lot through various professional identities and in different cultural contexts.

As for the languages, we had twelve on the set of The Disappearance of Josef Mengele. We brought people from various countries. It was crucial for me to have native speakers, because it always feels fake otherwise. I hear it in other films, and it’s bullshit. I insisted on this authenticity, even though it was more expensive. We had people speaking Brazilian Portuguese – not Portuguese from Portugal as the film partially takes place in Brazil; Spanish, and Umbanda practitioners who could authentically play Umbanda. It was a complicated pastiche of different faces, identities, and speeches. But it was a kind of pleasure for the German people living in South America – we collected them from different places. Not all of them wanted to participate, of course, because of their past.