Set in the waning months of World War II in Europe, Tony Vahl’s debut feature, Krux – based on true yet widely unknown events – aims its lens at a small eastern German village instructed to coerce its residents into collective suicide, allegedly to avoid humiliation upon the arrival of the Red Army. The movie is screening in the Discovery section of Toronto as well as the main competition of San Sebastián.

Cineuropa: You tackle this story through the structure of an ensemble cast. Could you talk about the decision behind this approach?
Tony Vahl: For the writing, I start with the atmosphere I want to create. I’m a fan of The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke, but I fought a lot against the structure of that story. In this time period, you have more women than men. It was clear that I wanted to have a platform for the women. The idea was to make it start with one character, but then open it up like a fan. One thing we discussed a lot was that we don’t know so much about the characters: we have no backstory. We jump with them into a concrete situation, and then we go with them through this situation until the end. Only in the end do we know who decides to commit suicide or not [as they are told to].

What kind of information did you need in order to create the historical backdrop, and how did the themes emerge from there?
I did research for one full year, but it wasn’t so easy to find material. It was also a very sensitive issue we were dealing with. I was thinking more about bringing in symbols, as it tells us more about the Nazi system. I also like to work with key questions. What happens when a protective zone collapses? And what brought mothers to kill their own children?

I reflected on how it’s so easy to say yes to everything, but also how powerful it is to say no against the masses. Fear is powerful because when fear becomes panic, panic leads us to blame people. It’s also about trying to listen to your own moral compass at a time when you have one story from the leader and you’re encouraged to believe this single story. For this film, I was thinking more about present times. I’m not really a fan of war movies.

What were you inspired by instead?
I like mystery, superstition and also a bit of horror, but not in a way in which you show everything. I wanted to have a sensitive approach to observing things. I like it more when you hide something and the audience has more of a chance to interpret the scenes for themselves. I like it when you can feel the movie in your guts, like what Steve McQueen did with Hunger.

We have so many war movies; we have so many stories about 1945. I was wondering how I could make this story a bit different or tell it more from the inner psychological mechanisms of these people. I wanted to build it more from the inside than the outside. I didn’t want any pictures from the war. We have one single person who brings in information from the outside – the soldier – and who is the only person who was surely on the front.

My goal is for people not to see the movie as a history lesson – I want them to see it as a moral fairy tale that tells us something about our times. However, the reality of everything was much worse than what I showed, so this movie is really a soft version of what happened. For our audience, I guess it’s enough.

You have a lot of dark and suggestive images, but you actively abstain from showing perhaps the most extreme ones. How did you decide what was too strong and what was suitable for this work?
I work on the topic of death – how you depict death, how we react to death – in my short films as well. Previously, I shot a film in a [forensic pathology lab], and I stayed there for two months to write the story directly from reality. We also filmed corpses there. It’s sometimes more interesting when you just see an arm or something from far away. As an audience member, you have this feeling that you want to see it, but then the director says no. The audience starts to fill it with their own fantasy, and that’s really interesting for me. I studied psychology before, and I was always interested in how you can direct people into [certain emotions] – how our nervous system works.

When you’ve worked for so long on this topic, then it becomes tougher. I always ask friends whether it’s too extreme. We had an ethical approach that was included in the shoot to not show so much. When the nursery children find the dead bodies [of those who committed suicide], it was a decision that we didn’t want to see it from the front – just from the back. When the mayor finds [his child], for me, it was clear that we needed to show it the way we did [by not revealing the whole body]. I added these little details – maybe some people don’t recognise them, but I read a lot about what happens when someone hangs themselves. It takes a lot of time, but I like to be exact.