The gripping historical drama LABYRINTH OF LIES [Im Labyrinth des Schweigens], Germany’s official submission for the 2016 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, opens in Frankfurt in 1958. Nobody wants to look back to the time of the Hitler’s National Socialist regime. Young public prosecutor Johann Radmann comes across some documents that help initiate a trial against some members of the SS who served in Auschwitz. But both the horrors of the past and others’ hostility towards his work bring Johann close to a meltdown. It is nearly impossible for him to find his way through this maze; everybody seems to have been involved or guilty.
LABYRINTH OF LIES director/co-screenwriter Giulio Ricciarelli said this about his film: “I wanted to tell a story about personal courage, of fighting for what is right and taking a stand. And it is a story of redemption. In Frankfurt in 1963 Germans put Germans on trial for their crimes in the Holocaust. Eighteen years after the war, it was the first time ever Germany really confronted it’s past, and it was a turning point in our history of immense importance.
“In this age of globalization and inter-connectedness, this story reminds us that it is always individuals who bring about change and it is individuals who push forward civilization.
“The film begins in Germany in 1958. An atmosphere of frantic optimism and denial, a country rebuilding itself, only looking forward. Yet the shadow of its war crimes is catching up, literally around the corner. It will be a momentous task- can our heroes force a whole country to look at what it has done, to acknowledge its past?”