A few years ago German writer-director Felix Randau (Iceman) got what sounded like an interesting proposal from France: to direct episodes of a miniseries about Felix Kersten, the former massage therapist of Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
“When I got back to Berlin and read their concept, I really liked it,” he recalls. “But there was this one special sentence in it that said, ‘If Steven Spielberg had known about Felix Kersten, he would have shot a film about Felix Kersten and not about Oskar Schindler.’ I knew that Steven Spielberg struggled for, I don’t know, about 10 years before he started shooting Schindler’s List, and he’s a smart guy who has a lot of assistance. So I became suspicious and started my own research, going to the archives and reading a lot of books and stuff.”
In the process, he realized that Kersten’s legacy is much less clear-cut. “I figured out that the story the French guys wanted to shoot was a hero story, a superhero story,” Randau tells THR. “But I felt you simply cannot do it.” He soon started focusing his work energy elsewhere.
The result is his new film, I Is Another (Ich Ist ein Anderer), which world premieres on Friday, Aug. 7 in the Piazza Grande program of the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. Set in 1952, the film sees a journalist ambush Kersten and his wife on a train because she has doubts about the heroic narrative that he has been presenting about himself — one that might even get him the Nobel Peace Prize. What starts as a normal interview quickly turns into a psychological cat-and-mouse game. Is Kersten a hero or an impostor? Or could he maybe be both?
