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| Nakam |
A short film on a big subject. A 12-year-old boy taking on a huge burden. A true story from World War Two, reimagined only slightly, sees young violin prodigy Mitka (Anton Krymskiy) smuggle explosives into the bar where he works in a desperate bid to assassinate a group of SS commanders. The partisans backing him are trying to turn the tide of the war. He’s looking for revenge for his murdered family. The problem is that blowing up the bar could also cost the life of pianist Yegor (Yevgeni Sitokhin), his only friend.
This is Nakam, the Oscar-shortlisted short film by Andreas Kessler. I met up with the young German filmmaker just a short time after he received the news.
“We're really excited,” he says, his face shining. “I'm really excited that we got onto the shortlist and everything, and we'll see how it goes. But yeah, we were really, really happy. When I actually when I got the news, I was watching a video and then a friend of mine who actually is in the Academy, he wrote me ‘Congratulations!’ And then one of the producers called and then we had very long talks during the whole night.” He laughs. “It was very funny.”
The film is based, as I understand it, on the story of Motele Schlein, who blew up a restaurant in Belarus.
“Yeah, exactly. I read about this story years ago in the newspaper, and I was really drawn to it because of all the themes and topics that were in that story. And also, I was just recently thinking, again, talking to somebody else, how courageous this young boy must have been, coming from a family that has been murdered and then like achieving that. He would survive in the forest on his own and then eventually get to be part of a Partisan Movement, even taking revenge for what he was living through and what was done to his family. And I felt this kind of insane strength the boy must have had. It was very touching to me. I couldn't let it go. And then at some point, six or eight years ago, I realised that I have to make this film.”
I mention that earlier in the year I spoke with Yoav Paz about Plan A, which explores an incident in which some Jewish Holocaust survivors plotted a revenge attack. Traditionally, cinema has tended to represent Jewish people in that context as helpless victims, and now I’m starting to see more stories which acknowledge their anger. Does he feel that the narrative is starting to change, and was that a contributing factor in how he chose to tell this story?
“That was certainly like a factor that was also very interesting to me, because as you say, you don't see it that often. And then also, when I discovered the story, I knew I didn't want to make it only about revenge. Of course, this young boy is a hero, and a young boy who takes the strength to do all this is very impressive, but at the same time, I was thinking like, once you get to know a place where you work, the tragedy to me was more, when he goes there every day and everything, how would he stay away from emotional attachment? Then on the other hand, how what would happen if he wouldn't be able to stay completely away from it, getting to know people, getting to know this pianist?
“Then also raising the question, what is revenge, and what is violence also all about? Like, doesn't it always create more violence? Often it's a downward spiral and on the one hand, I totally can understand why you would do that and why you take revenge and everything. On the other hand, of course, it’s like all wars, always creating suffering, and the only way to end the suffering is to end the war. It's all this complexity that I was very interested to understand.
“Also, what is justice in that sense? Like for the partisans, it's completely good that it happened. Of course, totally understandable, because they want to harm the occupiers, the Germans and the Nazis. But then on the other hand, in the sense of the boy, he also wants to do justice to his family, but it's getting harder and harder as soon as he realises he has to take this pianist out. And we saw so many topics. But it came very much also from this idea that if you play music with somebody you get to know this person very quickly. I also played violin for a long time, or like a few years at least. From the beginning of the film, I wanted to talk about these kind of bonds, invisible bonds between the two of them that's getting created.”
The boy also has a bond of sorts with his contact in the Resistance, and that relationship is interestingly played here, so that we wonder how much Mitka is really acting on what he believes is right, and how much he’s being manipulated.
“Yeah, I totally wanted to keep that on a very ambiguous level. Because for me, it's totally understandable if they have such a great chance to to harm the Nazis, that they would do everything to do it in the way that it would work out. But then on the other hand, I totally can imagine, I mean, we imagined all the backstory, how it would have started, who would have had the idea and everything. And I totally can imagine that at some point, he was probably very enthusiastic about it. But when he realised, ‘Oh, it's going to be a lot harder than what I realised,’ and he can't really talk about that very fact, to anybody, that was for me more the tragedy.
“ I can totally understand that the partisans would do everything to make it happen, and the boy in a way also, but nobody knows, nobody talks directly what's going on in their mind, in a way. And that's also part of the problem. At some point he says ‘There won't be only Germans when I do it,’ and yeah, it's just like all this complexity that we even starts see now in the horrible new war against Ukraine. People create bonds, they say, ‘Those are the bad guys, those are the good guys,’ and it's always a question also, maybe, of perspective.
“The complex situation that boy was in was my main goal to understand and to emotionally dig in and open up, because in the end, what I sought to make was a kind of anti war film, to show that it's always about the children, they suffer the most in the end.”
The morality of the situation is simplified for Mitka when he overhears the commanders making plans for the local population.
“I think the boy would understand a little bit about this, and I also like the audience to really understand what kind of people are sitting there,” Andreas explains. “Of course they are horrible, but I think through the dialogue at that moment, you understand more: okay, they lead the horrible massacres there. And so just to understand, in a second, why the boy would do what he does in the end.
“This was also very important for us with the SS officer August Seeger, who also realises, okay, this boy is learning a little bit of German, he's playing the violin, he's on his own but he's surviving. And there is this ambiguity also, like, if Seeger wouldn't know anything about the boy, in another world, he would maybe even be a little bit like impressed by the boy and everything, right? But as soon as he would understand that he's Jewish, and so on, he would totally keep his agenda and do horrible things to him.
“That's like this weird ambiguity that was also very important to us to show, sometimes in little moments when they have this discussion about the violin case and then he looks to the boy and kind of thinks, ‘Okay, interesting boy.’ But he's neither like completely hating him or loving him or whatever, right? That was important to me.”
It also seems important just to say that Nazis weren't necessarily obviously horrible people – that one could meet somebody like that and think he was a nice man, if one didn't know any better.
“Yeah, that's always a super complex situation. Because on the one hand, he is a horrible man, because of exactly what he does, what he believes especially, and the ideologies he's purveying, and that makes him this horrible man. But there's always complexity to everything. He probably also has a daughter that he loves and stuff, you know? Everybody comes from a human point. But the question is, what are they doing now? And how are they behaving and then pursuing their objectives?
“In that case, of course, like we showed him, he’s sometimes like somebody who might have a little interest in the young boy, but then also he’s somebody who is willing to kill anybody in the blink of a second, and those kind of contrasts and absurdity.”.
Does he think that how these kinds of stories are told is something that has had to change in cinema over the years, because filmmakers are now speaking to different audiences, and people who have less than awareness? Few people now have grandparents who fought in the war, and that kind of thing.
“Certainly a little bit,” he agrees. “But I mean, it's always hard. I just had recently a talk where somebody asked me ‘Is there is a lot of teaching in Germany right now about the Holocaust?’ And of course, there's still a lot of teaching, but also when I cast the young boy, for example, it was very interesting because it's at this age of 10, 11, 12, and some young boys, they don't know that much about this time. And then Anton Krymskiy, the lead actor, he knew so much because he was talking to his grandpa all the time about the war, and that was really cool, how much he knew and how much he would understand.”
Did that influence the decision to cast him, or were there other factors that were really important?
“There were also other factors,” he says, “but that was one very important factor, because you have this kind of awareness or understanding about this whole situation and what danger it would mean. There were other boys at the age of nine or something, who didn't know that much yet. I think the teaching starts around nine, 10, 11, or something like that. But that was interesting. And Anton, also, I gave him the violin, and he said he’d never played before. And I said ‘If you want the role, you have to go to violin class, like, two or three months before the shooting starts.’ And then he was like, ‘Yeah.’ He was totally fine with that. And he actually did that.
“He learned how to play the violin for two and a half months before. And that was super impressive because, yeah, he had that spring to go through a lot of kind of hurdles to become this character. And one also important thing was when we have the scene with the partisan where he says he's having some issues and he doesn't know if they should do it or not, in that scene, it was very interesting, because he could show is, on the one hand, this willingness to do it to, to take on the mission and to do the attack, and then also show the struggle that he has, and that's also what I wanted to tell.
“He’s a boy who's very young. He is around 12, maybe 14 but probably 12, who has already the duties of an adult in a way, who has to take decisions that even adults don't want to take. But on the other hand, he's not completely just doing what somebody says, he's taking also a decision.”
A great deal of the relationship between the boy and the pianist is conveyed in brief glances and movements and so on. Beyond the music, how did he approach it as a director, to capture that relationship between them?
“We did some rehearsing, and that was really a pleasure,” he says. “It was super funny also, in a way, because we have Yevgeni [Sitokhin] as the guy who plays a pianist and doesn't play piano, and a guy who doesn't play the violin, and how's that going to happen? But I told them it didn't matter, and I realised that they both would rehearse and practice a lot. And they definitely did. And, of course, Yevgeni always said ‘I don't play piano. It looks horrible,’ and then when we did the first rehearsal, that was fine.
“We didn't have that much time for rehearsals, but the ones that we had were kind of intense in the way that they got to know each other. Also Yevgeny is just a really good actor and he plays in many films, and he would give advice to the boy and Anton kind of would say ‘Yeah, I don't need to go to acting school,’ and Yevgeni would say ‘You’ve got to go to acting school. You can still learn a lot, trust me,’ and everything. It was a funny dynamic because he was this kind of boy who would be proud of what he would do, but then also listen to the real professional, his colleague.”
I tell him that to my mind, when one is doing anything creative, one just keeps learning throughout life.
“Yeah, totally. You always learn something. Also, with this project, I really wanted to work with actors in the most deliberate way. I really wanted to try things out, but then also give them a lot of time to just do what they wanted to do. Because we had to rehearse beforehand it was clear where we wanted it. Since there were scenes that were several minutes, I wanted to always kind of give the actors a lot of freedom and a lot of time.
“That scene when they are at the piano place and they are just talking, it was really interesting because we shot it with two cameras at the same time. Anton was a little bit sick at that moment, and he was really struggling and seeing the space from the piano for the first time. We did this three times and in every take there was something interesting, in my eyes. And that was a workflow that I like because before I also shot films on 16 millimetre and so I wanted to adapt things out of that process but also have the liberty to really show everything that we planned.”
He has several projects on the go at present, he reveals, but amongst them is a feature-length version of this story, filling in a lot more background and exploring other incidents in the lives of the partisans. As for Nakam itself, he’s eagerly waiting for 24 January to find out if it has made it to the next stage of the Oscars.
