Polish director Agnieszka Holland has revealed details about her next feature film project, a biographical film about Marlene Dietrich, “Berlinweh – Yearning for a Home.”
The film is being produced by the same team that backed Holland’s “Franz,” Berlin-based production company X Filme Creative Pool, the Czech company Marlene Film Production and British-Irish producer Mike Downey. It is based on a screenplay by Ingo Rasper.
The film follows Dietrich across four decisive days in four different decades, portraying her in shifting cultural and political contexts: Paris in 1937, Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Tel Aviv in 1960, and once again Paris in 1983.
Holland said, “Every time I tell myself I won’t make films about real, famous people anymore… and then someone emerges from the past who asks me the most important, most timely questions, in whose choices I can find my own choices and anxieties.”
She added, “Marlene Dietrich was a tangle of contradictions: a glamour star, yet an outstanding actress, singer and soldier; a selfish ego-centrist and a loyal, magnanimous friend and lover; a fighter for human rights, full of fears and uncertainties; a German who, in the eyes of many of her countrymen, became a traitor.
“We do not tell her life in a continuous, linear narrative. We look for those few turning moments in which what was most important and most universal — what resonates most strongly today in her fate — is reflected. The fate of a woman, an artist, a citizen, a human being.”
More to follow.