This years Portland German Film Festival (Oct. 5-9, 2018 @ CINEMA 21) and KINOFEST Seattle (Oct. 19-21, 2018 @ The SIFF Film Center) will both open with director Claus Räfle’s film ” The Invisibles” (Die Unsichtbaren – Wir wollen leben).
Unbelievable, but true: During the Second World War, some young Jews managed to become invisible in the anonymity of Berlin.
THE INVISIBLE is an extraordinary drama, based on interviews conducted by director Claus Räfle and co-author Alejandra López, and included in their film. They tell the exciting and highly emotional story of these daring heroes, devoting themselves to a largely unknown chapter of Jewish resistance. The film was on the short list for submission as Germany’s entry to the Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film for 2019.
Film Synopses:
Four young Jews survive the Third Reich in the middle of Berlin by living so recklessly that they become “invisible.”
Hanni, Cioama, Eugen and Ruth. Four ordinary German youths trying to navigate the scarcities and prohibitions of Berlin at the height of World War II. They hailed from different social classes and different neighborhoods, but they shared a single common secret: they were Jews.
While Goebbels infamously declared Berlin “free of Jews” in 1943, some 1,700 managed to survive in Nazism’s capital until liberation. Claus Räfle’s gripping docudrama traces the stories of four real-life survivors who learned that sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight. While moving between cinemas, cafés and safe houses they dodged Gestapo and a dense network of spies and informants, knowing that certain death was just one mistake away. Yet their prudence was at odds with their youthful inclination towards recklessness, sometimes prompting them to join the resistance, forge passports, or pose as Aryan war widows. Masterfully weaving the different story threads together, The Invisibles is a testament to the resourcefulness, willpower, and sheer chance that permit us to survive against incredible odds.
Since the early ’90s, Claus Räfle’s body of work, distinctive through its modern journalistic approach and visual sophistication, has been noted by jurors and TV critics for its signature humor and laconic narrative style. Many of his almost 40 feature-length TV documentaries, on which he has also served as writer, are distinct through their unconventional perspective, thoroughly entertaining in the best sense of the word, and have found their way across borders. His satirical TV documentary, Die Heftmacher, was praised by the jury of the German Grimme Award as the most important work of TV journalism in that year. His video clips from the 1990s garnered lots of attention with their pointedly told stories. Räfle developed and wrote The Invisibles with Alejandra López.
