Dunham said she was nervous to meet Fry, adding, “Meeting our heroes is complicated and it turned out to be better than I ever dreamed.”
The film depicts the pair taking a road trip to Poland to trace their family history. Frye plays Edek, a Holocaust survivor who reluctantly accompanies his daughter Ruth, a New York journalist. He confronts painful memories and shares parts of his past that were buried for years.
This story is based on the book Too Many Men by Lily Brett.
Frye learned Polish for the role. Both actors, he said, have ties to Jewish heritage.
“As I was reading the script, I could hear my grandfather's voice, and it got even stronger as the story progressed,” Frye said. “I never thought as a child that I would have the opportunity to re-examine the story in this way.”
“I had the same experience as Stephen,” Dunham said. “I hear echoes of my great-grandmother Mildred, not just the stories we told as a family, but the stories we didn’t tell.”
Dunham's family was from Poland, close to where the film was shot. Her great-grandmother lost her nine siblings at the start of the Holocaust in 1941. She first learned about it by researching her family's history.
Her character, Ruth, suffers from the untold aftermath of her parents' experiences. It was this trauma that von Heinz wanted to explore.
“If someone in a family is going through war or terrorism or trauma and they're not going to talk about it, maybe to protect their children or to protect themselves, they're going to feel it,” the director said. Ta. “It travels through the generations until someone feels it and is ready to confront and have a dialogue with their parents.”
Fry said it's understandable that a survivor whose daughter grew up in New York wouldn't want her children to know “the depth of the absolute depravity that I witnessed every day as a survivor of Auschwitz.”
He added, “She's in America. She's free. This is a land of wonder and splendor and happiness, and a land of very happy Jews.”
Photography inside Auschwitz is prohibited, so von Heinz obtained special permission to recreate the barracks on a soccer field just outside the fence. She felt that scenes there were essential to Fry's portrayal of Edek.
“This place gives you something you can't say, but you can feel,” she said.
The film premiered in Berlin at a time of rising anti-Semitism and support for the far right, especially in Germany.
Von Heinz said all performers were in touch via text message during the October 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. This led to the decision to complete the film ahead of schedule and to show it here at the Berlinale because now is the perfect moment to show a film like this.
But Dunham said it was the story's broader meaning that she wanted to convey.
“It's not just anti-Semitism that's on the rise, it's Islamophobia. It's racism in America. It's fear of difference,” she said. “And to talk about what happens across generations when people, not just Jews, are isolated or subjected to violence or subjected to such hateful surveillance. , I think is really, really important to us.”
