Documentary portrait of the actress Romy Schneider, in which director Frederick Baker tries to form an overall picture from the facets of image, myth, real life and screen persona.
Social & External
The people behind it
Romy Schneider
Self (archive footage)
Elisa Fasolt
Romy als Kleinkind
Lisbeth Mahn
Synchron-Schwimmerin
Andy Woerz
Narrator (voice)
Julia Cencig
(voice)
Nina Strehlein
Philipp Blom
Christian Strasser
Thomas Eichhorn
Sarah Biasini
Self
The camera loved her face, it was made for close-ups. And Romy Schneider loved and needed the camera - the film camera as well as the cameras of photographers and paparazzi. Julia Benkert's cinematic exploration of Romy Schneider's many faces shows that the actress's fascinating camera presence has lost none of its intensity even 27 years after her death - regardless of whether she was stylized as a veiled bride and glamorous diva, as in the French film "L'enfer" (1964), or whether she exposed herself to the camera without make-up, as in Hans Jürgen Syberberg's documentary "Portrait of a Face" (1966). Without make-up and in close-up, she talks about her fears and doubts - to this day, the film is an authentic testimony to Romy Schneider's deep inner turmoil. Her husband Harry Meyen had it extensively censored because he thought his wife was too sad.
Eva Ebner is a Berliner who gives the appearance of being rather eccentric. She knows the film business inside out – regardless of whether she’s work- ing behind the camera as an assistant director or in front of it as an actor. Her name is closely associated with a series of now-legendary adaptations of Edgar Wallace’s crime novels which were made in Germany during the 1960s. Upcoming young directors from local film schools have also profited from Ms. Ebner’s unbroken enthusiasm and passion for film. However, this eighty-year-old has a more than broken relationship to the events of her childhood and youth in Gdansk – a time when her life was characterised by an anti-Semitic step-mother and the dangers posed by the Nazi regime. This film portrait does not eschew any of the long dark shadows of that era, nor does it sidestep any friction between portrayer and his subject. (Lothar Lambert)
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