How does a German teenager, the daughter of a Nazi officer, face up to the fall of the Third Reich, and the revelation of the regime's true nature? Just as pertinently, how does an Australian filmmaker of Jewish heritage go about probing the immense moral conundrum facing such a protagonist, herself an unformed innocent?
'The moral questions weren't answered in 1945,' said Cate Shortland, writer-director of Lore, when I spoke to her after a recent press screening ahead of the film's release this week. 'The country was in shock and denial — it was a real shutdown. Also they were just trying to survive.'
Survival is certainly on the mind the title character, played by newcomer Saskia Rosendahl. Her mother and father have been apprehended, leaving her to guide her four siblings, including her infant brother, on a sometimes gruesome cross-country trek, in search of a perceived safe haven at their grandmother's house.
It is a coming-of-age story for Lore, in the truest sense of the phrase; a journey from innocence to maturity via hard experience. Her journey mirrors that of her country, which as the film begins is yet to shake off its illusions about Hitler, and has only just begun to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust.
'People lost faith in National Socialism not because they suddenly stopped being anti-Semitic, but because they were being badly bombed and losing so many soldiers,' says Shortland. 'In December-January they lost 800,000 civilians and soldiers. When our films starts the whole country is in a state of shock.'
Lore is based on Rachel Seiffert's 2001 Booker shortlisted novel The Dark Room — actually a collection of three novellas, which are set before and during the war, immediately after it, and in modern times respectively. 'It's about how German's have dealt with National Socialism, but it's really intimate,' says Shortland.
Shortland and her producers selected the second novella, set in 1945, for adaptation 'because it's far more difficult terrain, trying to deal with what it means to be the child of a perpetrator, what it means to be indoctrinated, what it means when your whole country has lied'.
'I went to Berlin and did workshops with people who had been in the Hitler Youth and German Girls League, the fascist children's organisations. It wasn't like the war ended, Hitler committed suicide and everybody stopped loving him. One man told me he was really traumatised because he loved Hitler