The German director Killian Riedhod arrives at the 27th edition of the Festival de Málaga, specifically in the Mosaico Section: International Panorama with Stella, víctima y culpable, his new feature film in which he adapts the life of Stella Goldschlag, a German Jew who becomes a 'Jew hunter' to protect her family and herself from the Nazis.
 
Riedhod explained in a discussion after the film screening at the Cine Albéniz, that approximately twenty years ago, while reading the newspaper, he saw a photo of Stella Goldschlag in an article and was very struck by the way she looked 'so contemporary and so alive'. 'When I read the article, I was shocked because I saw that she had betrayed hundreds of people, many of them her friends, just to survive. But she had also been persecuted and tortured. Therefore, it was a story with an intrinsic ambivalence,' he explained.
 
This is how he became interested in the life of her character and decided to investigate more about her to make the film, and that is where the figure of Peter Wyden comes in, a classmate of Stella who had to emigrate to the United States due to the War and then returned to Germany. 'He wrote a book about everything Stella did, he is very meticulous and everything is very well detailed. But, in addition, we also had access to the court reports from that time and we were able to see what their friends testified when they were betrayed, telling their version of the story, so there is a very complete investigation out there,' he detailed.
 
Similarly, he explained that, although he had the idea for this project in mind for twenty years, it was not until 2017 when he began to write the script, since no one in Germany dared to make a film with a subject of such magnitude. 'It has been very complicated to get this project up and running and get financing for it, but a crazy producer loved the idea and we were finally able to move forward,' he said.
 
The German production is set in Berlin during World War II. Stella (Paula Beer) grew up in this city, a young Jewish woman who, despite having all the odds against her, dreams of becoming a jazz artist and singer and succeeding in Broadway, until what inevitably has to happen.
 
Persecuted by Nazism and forced in to hide, her life becomes a tragedy when the Gestapo captures her. Stella decides to make a pact to save herself and her parents from certain death in Auschwitz, and it is from that moment on when she herself becomes a Jewish hunter.


In the fine line between finding the right balance between having a minimum of empathy for the protagonist and at the same time showing the horrible things she did, the director asks the audience the question of what they would have done if they were in Stella’s shoes. 'When I read the article, I immediately asked myself what I would have done in her place, how far I would have gone to survive, and I realised that it is a very disturbing question,' he responded.
 
Regarding Beer's performance, the director said that it is 'impeccable'. 'She is a magnificent actress, she meticulously prepared and she captured everything that was happening in each scene perfectly, even in the darkest ones,' he admired.
 
Likewise, music is another important part of the film, and Riedhod said that he wanted it to show the phases that Stella was going through at all times, from the beginning of her dream to go to Broadway until her declining end.
 
After showing at the Festival de Málaga, the film will hit Spanish theatres on the 25th of March.