An 80-year-old German film legend confronts her Nazi past between takes on set.
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)
Direction
Lambert refuses to let his subject off the hook.
Acting
Ebner performs herself—sometimes unknowingly.
Director
Lothar Lambert
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Edgar Wallace films Ebner worked on were West Germany's postwar obsession—campy crime flicks that let a nation play detective while avoiding harder questions.
Lambert, a key figure of Berlin's underground cinema, spent decades filming women over 60—making this his most politically charged subject.
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