Based on the arresting true story of the Executioner of Emsland, The Captain follows a German army deserter, Willi Herold, after he finds an abandoned Nazi captain’s uniform in the final weeks of World War II.

Emboldened by the authority the uniform grants him, he amasses a band of stragglers who cede to his command despite the suspicions of some. Citing direct orders from the Fuhrer himself, he soon takes command of a camp holding German soldiers accused of desertion and begins to dispense harsh justice. Increasingly intoxicated by the unquestioned authority, this enigmatic imposter soon discovers that many people will blindly follow the leader, whomever that happens to be.

Direction: Robert Schwentke

Script: Robert Schwentke

Production: Frieder Schlaich

Co-Production: Irene von Alberti

Cinematography: Florian Ballhaus

Editing: Michał Czarnecki

Production Design: Harald Turzer

Costume Design: Magdalena Rutkiewicz-Luterek

Make-Up: Grit Hildenbrand, Doreen Kindler

Sound: André Bendocchi-Alves, Martin Steyer

Original Score: Martin Todsharow

Visual Effects: Jörn Großhans

Cast: Max Hubacher, Milan Peschel, Frederick Lau, Bernd Hölscher, Alexander Fehling, Waldemar Kobus, Samuel Finzi, Wolfram Koch, Britta Hammelstein

Original Title: DER HAUPTMANN

Original Language: German

Film Production Countries: Germany, France, Poland

Website: http://www.derhauptmann-film.de

Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/DerHauptmann.DerFilm/

Statement of the Director/s
Almost 70 years after the fact, the harsh brutalities of World War II still elicit incomprehension and dismay. By present-day standards, the violent acts committed seem abnormal, psychopathic, horrific.

But horror is a moral, not an analytical concept.

In order to explain Willi Herold’s actions we have to understand the world he lived in and not just our own world. We need to go beyond mere moral responses and experience the world from his point of view. Non-morally, so to speak, see what he saw, feel what he felt.

Aesthetically this does not mean the fetishizing of authenticity so common in historical films. “This is how it was!” is the mantra intoned, ignoring the fundamental fact that authenticity in cinema is always an illusion created by a team of filmmakers. Getting an era’s license plates right just isn’t enough.
Our audience needs to experience Herold’s historical, psychological and social reality directly, viscerally, emotionally. This story won’t be told from the outside in, but from the inside out. We will fully immerse the audience in Herold’s state of mind.

Our goal is not to justify or forgive Herold’s actions by contextualizing them, or worse: by introducing a moral relativism - but to understand the frame of reference which made these actions possible and so arrive at the general through the specific:

Herold’s highly particularized perspective of a specific historical event allows us to glimpse a universal truth about the human condition in wartimes -- past and present.
The continuity of violence connects all ages and cultures: Germany, Yugoslavia, Africa -- most recently Syria, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The layer of civilization covering the call of blood remains paper thin.

As the excesses of WW II pass from memory into history, are we any closer to understand why, or even how, they happened? The same can be asked about any one of the conflicts mentioned above. Neither has violence disappeared from societies considering themselves fundamentally
nonviolent. It exists at all times as both a fact and a possibility and as such plays a major role in human imaginations.

In our film this continuity is expressed by featuring purposefully anachronistic sights:
images of a contemporary Germany, both specific historical sites and ordinary, everyday environments.

This second temporal plane is also a response to the aforementioned fetishizing of authenticity. The fact that this movie is an object made in the year 2017, by filmmakers looking at the past with a certain historical perspective, will be an integral part of its visual strategy: we admit to the illusion of cinema.

There is another continuity that connects our world to that of the past: the act of renaming and the use of euphemism and their power to efface actual cruelties. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" was Stalin's apology for revolution and forced modernization in the 1930s.

If one extreme of euphemism comes from naturalizing the cruelties of power, the opposite extreme arises from a nerve-deadening understatement:
Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire: this is called pacification. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die in camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

The phrases are colorless by design and not by accident. There is a deliberate method in the imprecision of texture -- the mode of their nonmeaning is the point. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

The language used must admit to the tremendousness of the task and imply its eventual solubility, but also discourage any close inquiry into the means employed. As George Orwell believed, totalitarian minds are in part created by the ease and invisibility of euphemism. Like "pacification" and "elimination of unreliable elements," they are floating metaphors with a low yield of fact. But they leave an image of decisiveness, with an insinuation of contempt for persons slower to pass from thought to action.

What the men in our film say: “taking care of business” – “seeing this through” – “cleaning up this up.” What they mean: mass murder. This juxtaposition of innocuous wording and bloody deed is a central concern of our film – and a central concern in own our time:

When Seymour Hersh broke the story of Abu Ghraib, Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld was keen on excluding the word torture from all discussions of the coercive interrogations and planned humiliations at the prison. His chosen word was abuse: a word that has been devalued through its bureaucratization in therapies against spousal abuse, child abuse, and so on. "Torture," by comparison, still sets teeth on edge, and the word had been avoided for a long time.

This is especially significant for the notion of “war as a job,” which in turn is extremely important for soldiers’ interpretations of what they do. This industrial age interpretative paradigm informs Ernst Jünger’s famous description of soldiers as “workers of war.”

In Jünger’s words, war appears as “the extension of a customary activity at the workbench.” Against this backdrop, it is clear that if I interpret the killing of human beings as work, I do not categorize it as a crime and, thereby, normalize what I am doing. Actions that would be considered deviant and in need of explanation and justification in the normal, become conformist forms of behavior.

Then as now, euphemism automatizes moral self-examination and prevents soldiers from feeling guilty. Why tell this story? Because: “Through the past we comprehend the present, and through the present we prepare for the future.” (Arno Schmidt).

In psychological terms, the inhabitants of the Third Reich were as normal as people in all other societies at all other times. The spectrum of perpetrators was a cross section of normal society and no specific group of people proved immune to the temptation, in Günther Anders’s phrase, of “inhumanity with impunity.”

They are us. We are them. The past is now.

Biography of the Director/s
1968 born in Stuttgart
1987 high-school diploma at Gottlieb-Daimler Gymnasium in Stuttgart
1987-1989 study of „Philosophy“ and „Comparative Literature“,
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
1989-1993 study of „Film Production“, Columbia College Los Angeles
1993 B.A. Film Production
1993-1994 study of „Directing“, American Film Institute Los Angeles
1994 M.F.A. Directing
since 1995 international freelance director and screenwriter

Filmography of the Director/s
2017 Der Hauptmann // The Captain (script and director)
2016 The Divergent Series: Allegiant (director)
2015 The Divergent Series: Insurgent (director)
2014 The Novice - Pilot (director)
2013 R.I.P.D. (director)
2010 R.E.D. (director)
2009 The Time Traveler‘s Wife (director)
2009 Lie to Me (TV series) - Pilot (director)
2005 Flightplan (director)
2003 Eierdiebe (script and director)
2002 Tattoo (script and director)
2001 Tatort - Mördergrube (script)
1999 Tatort - Drei Affen (script)
1998 Tatort - Bildersturm (script)

Awards Won
BARI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018
Bif&st International Award to the Best Film Director, Robert Schwentke
Bif&st International Award to the Best Actor, Max Hubacher

VILNIUS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018
FIPRESCI PRIZE
International Critics Prize

FESTIVAL DE CINEMA EUROPEAN DES ARCS 2017
Young Jury Award
Special Mention
The 20 Minutes of Audacity Price

DEUTSCHER KAMERAPREIS
für Florian Ballhaus

SAN SEBASTIAN FILMFESTIVAL
Auszeichnung Beste Kamera für Florian Ballhaus

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E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: +33 1 42 01 07 05