Saturday April 5     the counterfeiters     15 cert 98 mins

Austria, 2007        Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, Starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl

Winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign language film, The Counterfieters is based on the true story of the little known Nazi ‘Operation Bernhard’ – a scheme to flood Allied economies with fake cash.

Skilled camp prisoners were used to create the counterfeit currency, and the film tells the story of anti-hero  Salomon Sorowitsch, a Russian Jew celebrated in the underworld as a master forger. Once imprisoned, Salomon exploits his skills as artist and counterfeiter, in a bid to survive the experience of the holocaust, whatever it takes.

The film explores questions of collaboration, and avoids the customary two dimensionality of WWII movies in favour of a clever, compelling moral complexity. In German with English subtitles.

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