The Dead and the Living

Director: Barbara Albert

2012 / 100min / DCP

At her beloved grandfather’s 95th birthday party, always-on-the-go 25-year-old Berliner Sita (an effervescent Anna Fischer) stumbles across an old photograph of the paterfamilias wearing an SS uniform; stonewalled by her father when asking for explanations, Sita then takes the investigation into her own hands, a journey that will lead to a Viennese archive, to Warsaw, and into a long buried and since unspoken part of her family’s past. Unique in its examination of war guilt as experienced from a distance of two generations, Albert’s historical excavation drama is lent considerable momentum through Fischer’s live-wire performance, Willi’s reliably spry cutting, and Lorenz Dangel’s score.