Press Booklet MAUTHAUSEN - TWO LIVES

INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTOR
1. What was your personal motivation to make a film about Mauthausen?
Mauthausen, like Auschwitz, is a synonym for the Holocaust, for the terrible crimes of National
Socialism, for guilt and shame. Austrians have the Holocaust in their minds, the people
in Mauthausen have it in front of their eyes every day, whether they want to or not. I was
interested in how the local residents, who were very young at the time, deal with this past of
theirs to this day. Two completely opposite fates occurred here in immediate vicinity: that
of the concentration camp detainees and that of the residents of Mauthausen. Were there
parallels and similarities, to what extent did these lifelimotines cross? I wanted to deal with
those questions cinematically.
2. Was it easy to raise the funding?
Fortunately yes, the film funding sources very quickly recognized the importance of the
topic and the dramatics of the history.
3. Concerning research: How did you go about gathering information, where did you search
for archive footage? How long did it take?
The research was mainly done by the journalist Andreas Kuba. As co-founder of „a letter to the
stars“, he was able to draw on the association‘s extensive database of contemporary witnesses.
The search for archive material, however, turned out to be more difficult. On the one hand,
we were able to access the archives of the Mauthausen Memorial, but on the other hand, my
production manager Michael Holzinger had to do research in Poland, France and the USA.
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